Happy ending for a biopic, but Chandrayaan 3's happy beginning for India ! Bharat becomes first country to land on lunar south pole

After a 40-day journey starting from the Sathish Dhawan Space Center in Sriharikota, the Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO) Chandrayaan-3 mission has landed successfully. The Vikram lander should made a soft lunar landing at 6.04 PM IST on August 23.

 

Soon after that a roaring applause breaks out in the mission control headquarters as the lander module reaches 100 metres from the surface of the moon.

 

 

 

“We have achieved soft landing on the moon, India is on the moon,” says Sreedhara Panicker Somanath, Chairman of ISRO.

 

 

 

ISRO started the automatic landing sequence at 5.44 PM IST. The Vikram lander is now using its onboard computers and logic to try to make a soft landing on the Moon. While mission controllers at ISTRAC will monitor it closely, the onboard systems of the lander will be doing all the heavy lifting.

 

The Chandrayaan-3 mission is the follow-up to the Chandrayaan-2 mission of 2019, when the Vikram lander crashed into the lunar surface. The primary objective of the mission is simple—showcase the space agency’s capability to complete a soft-landing on the Moon. With the mission, India has joined a small and exclusive club of countries that have managed to soft land on the Moon. So far, the club has three members—the United States, the Soviet Union and China.