Chandrayaan-3

Chandrayaan-3 (CHUN-drə-YAHN /ˌtʃʌndrəˈjɑːn/) is the third mission in the Chandrayaan programme, a series of lunar-exploration missions developed by ISRO. The mission consists of Vikram, a lunar lander, and Pragyan, a lunar rover, as replacements for the equivalents on Chandrayaan-2, which had crashed on landing in 2019.

The spacecraft was launched on July 14, 2023, at 14:35 IST from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SDSC) in Sriharikota, India. It entered lunar orbit on 5 August, and touched down near the lunar south pole, at 69°S, on 23 August 2023 at 18:04 IST (12:33 UTC). With this landing, ISRO became the fourth national space agency to successfully land on the Moon, after the Soviet space program, NASA and CNSA, and the first organization in the recorded human history to achieve a soft landing near the lunar south pole.

The lander was not built to withstand the cold temperatures of the lunar night, so it was shut down at sunset over the landing site, twelve days after landing. The orbiting propulsion module remained operational and was repurposed for scientific observations of Earth; it was shifted from lunar orbit to a high Earth orbit on 22 November 2023, where it remains in service.