At 12:32 UTC on the 23rd of August, Chandrayaan-3 successfully touched down on the Lunar surface! The landing makes India the fourth country to successfully touchdown with a soft landing on the Moon. The landing site is at 69.367621 degrees south and 32.348126 degrees east, near the Lunar South Pole.
The lander and its deployable rover are expected to last fourteen Earth days, or one Lunar day. As of writing the rover is yet to be deployed from the lander but is expected to happen soon.
What is Chandrayaan-3?
Chandrayaan-3 is a follow-up Lunar landing mission to Chandrayaan-2 which failed to land on the Moon on the 6th of September 2019 after a software glitch. The lander for Chandrayaan-3 science payloads are; Chandra’s Surface Thermophysical Experiment (ChaSTE) to measure the thermal conductivity and temperature, Instrument for Lunar Seismic Activity (ILSA) for measuring the seismicity around the landing site, and a passive Laser Retroreflector Array from NASA is accommodated for lunar laser ranging studies. Onboard the lander is also a small 26-kilogram rover that will be deployed after landing on the Lunar surface. The rover also has two payloads; Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer (APXS), and Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscope (LIBS) for deriving the elemental composition in the vicinity of the landing site.