On Wednesday India joined the United States, Russia and China as one of the only nations on Earth to navigate its technology onto the surface of the Moon. Perhaps even more impressive, the Indian mission known as Chandrayaan-3 managed to land its rover in the southern polar region, the first country to do so without crashing. Indeed that's exactly what happened with Chandrayaan-2 in 2019, the mission previous to this one. It was the second lunar space mission in the Indian Space Research Organization's Chandrayaan programme, which lost control and destroyed itself on the Moon following a software glitch.
The successful Chandrayaan-3 mission included two spacecrafts: A lander named Vikram and a rover named Pragyan. In addition to being an important accomplishment for the Indian scientific community, the mission also moves humanity closer to its goal of creating a lunar colony.
