The story so far: In a historic feat, the Chandrayaan-3 lander touched down near the south pole of the moon on August 23. The landing follows on the heels of Russia’s failure to land its Luna-25 on the lunar south pole after it crashed owing to an engine malfunction.
This was closely followed on September 2, by the successful launch of solar research mission Aditya L-1, a space-based observatory to observe the sun.
India now joins an elite club of four countries which have placed a spacecraft on the lunar surface, after the United States, Soviet Union, and China. But it is the first to do so close to the south pole, where there is evidence of the presence of water.
