Vikram + Pragyan

Mission specifications

Operator

ISRO

Prime contractor

ISRO

Launch

2023-07-14

Landing

2023-08-23

Landing site

Statio Shiv Shakti, 69.37°S — first soft landing near lunar south pole

Customer

ISRO

Payload

Pragyan rover 27 kg + lander Vikram 1,749 kgas of 2023-08-23^[1]

Contract value

₹6.15B (~$75M USD)as of 2023-07-14^[2]Total programme cost — among the lowest-cost lunar landings in history

Key findings

• 1.Achieved the first-ever soft landing near the lunar south pole (Statio Shiv Shakti, ~69.4°S) and made ISRO only the fourth space agency to soft-land on the Moon — for a total programme cost of about ₹6.15 billion (~$75M), among the cheapest lunar landings ever.
• 2.The Pragyan rover's LIBS and APXS instruments made the first in-situ elemental measurements near the south pole, confirming sulphur and detecting aluminium, calcium, iron, chromium, titanium, manganese, silicon and oxygen in the regolith.
• 3.The lander's ChaSTE probe took the first direct temperature profile of the polar surface — a peak of about 355 K (~82°C) at the top dropping to roughly 105 K (~-168°C) just 10 cm down, revealing a steep near-surface thermal gradient.
• 4.APXS data showed uniform major-element abundances across the site, corroborating the decades-old Lunar Magma Ocean hypothesis for how the Moon's crust formed, with sulphur enrichment pointing to primitive-mantle material.
• 5.Vikram performed a controlled 'hop', briefly reigniting its engines to lift ~40 cm and set down again — an in-flight demonstration of restartable propulsion relevant to future sample-return and crewed landings.

Mission outcome

Chandrayaan-3 was a landmark: the first spacecraft to soft-land near the Moon's south pole, and India's first lunar landing, accomplished at a fraction of the cost of comparable missions. Over roughly one lunar day of surface operations the Pragyan rover and Vikram lander delivered genuine science — the first in-situ elemental survey and direct temperature profile of the polar regolith, confirmation of sulphur, and evidence supporting the Lunar Magma Ocean model of the Moon's origin. Vikram's engine-restart 'hop' further demonstrated capabilities that feed directly into ISRO's follow-on sample-return ambitions.