Chandrayaan-3 — first soft landing near lunar south pole

In the final minutes before touchdown at 6:04 p.m. India time on 23 August 2023, more than eight million people were watching a single YouTube stream, the largest live audience the platform had ever recorded. In mission control at Bengaluru, engineers who had watched Chandrayaan-2's lander crash four years earlier now followed Vikram's descent toward terrain no spacecraft had ever survived: the cratered, deep-shadowed country at 69 degrees south. The velocity readouts fell, gently, all the way to zero. Cheers tore through the room, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, watching by video link from the BRICS summit in Johannesburg, waved the Indian tricolour.

The triumph was engineered out of grief. After the 2019 failure, ISRO rebuilt the mission around what chairman S. Somanath called a failure-based design, strengthening the lander's legs, widening the landing zone and adding margin so Vikram could land safely even if sensors or an engine misbehaved. Launched on 14 July 2023 aboard an LVM3 rocket from Sriharikota, the spacecraft took a slow, fuel-efficient route, looping through ever-larger Earth orbits before sliding into lunar orbit on 5 August. The entire mission cost about 615 crore rupees, roughly 75 million US dollars, less than many Hollywood films.

For one lunar day, the landing site, since named Statio Shiv Shakti, became India's laboratory. The 26-kilogram Pragyan rover rolled down the ramp and made the first on-the-spot measurement of sulfur in the soil near the lunar south pole, while Vikram's thermal probe recorded how sharply temperatures change within centimetres of the surface. Before the lunar night fell, Vikram fired its engines one last time and hopped, rising about 40 centimetres and setting down a short distance away, a tiny rehearsal for the sample-return missions India now plans. Neither machine woke from the two-week polar night, but their work was complete.