Chandrayaan-1 launches

At 6:22 on the morning of 22 October 2008, a PSLV rose into the dawn sky above Sriharikota, on India's east coast, carrying the country's first spacecraft bound for another world. Chandrayaan-1, 'Moon craft' in Sanskrit, was the work of an agency better known for weather and communications satellites, flying on a budget of 386 crore rupees, around 88 million dollars, astonishingly lean for a planetary mission. Half a century after the space age began, India was going to the Moon, and doing it in its own frugal style.

The 1,380-kilogram spacecraft carried 11 instruments, five Indian and six from international partners, an unusually open payload for a nation's first deep-space attempt. It entered lunar orbit on 8 November 2008 and began mapping from 100 kilometres up. Six days later came the gesture the country remembers: the Moon Impact Probe, painted with the Indian tricolour, detached and struck near Shackleton crater at the lunar south pole on 14 November, Jawaharlal Nehru's birthday. The impact point was named Jawahar Point in his honour.

The science that followed changed everyone's idea of the Moon. NASA's Moon Mineralogy Mapper, riding aboard Chandrayaan-1, detected the unmistakable spectral signature of water and hydroxyl molecules spread thinly across the lunar surface, while the impact probe's own CHACE instrument had sensed water vapour during its descent. Announced in September 2009, the discovery overturned decades of textbook certainty that the Moon was bone dry, and pointed straight at the polar deposits that every major lunar program now chases.

Contact with the orbiter was lost on 29 August 2009, after 312 days and more than 3,400 lunar orbits, short of the planned two years but with the great majority of its objectives met. The story had one more twist: in 2017, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory found the silent spacecraft with ground-based radar, still faithfully circling the Moon. Chandrayaan-2 and the historic south-pole landing of Chandrayaan-3 in 2023 grew directly from the mission that began this morning.