The first pictures of the Moon taken by Chandrayaan-3, India’s third unmanned Moon mission, have been made public by the Indian Space Research Organisation, or ISRO.
The pictures were taken by Chadrayan-3 when it entered the Moon’s orbit on Saturday.
The Moon, as viewed by #Chandrayaan3 spacecraft during Lunar Orbit Insertion (LOI) on August 5, 2023.#ISRO pic.twitter.com/xQtVyLTu0c
— LVM3-M4/CHANDRAYAAN-3 MISSION (@chandrayaan_3) August 6, 2023
“The Moon, as viewed by Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft during Lunar Orbit Insertion (LOI) on August 5, 2023,” tweeted the Mission’s official Twitter handle.
The Moon mission has been smooth so far and the ISRO expects the Vikram lander to make a soft landing on the lunar surface later this month on August 23.
Also read: What are the main objectives of Chandrayaan-3?
On Saturday, 22 days after its launch for a challenging 41-day journey to the lunar south pole, where no other country has gone before, Chandrayaan-3 successfully entered the lunar orbit.
“I am feeling lunar gravity,” was Chandrayaan 3’s message to the ISRO after the required maneuver that took it closer to the Moon was carried out without any glitch from the space agency’s facility in Bengaluru.
The injection into the lunar orbit marked a major milestone in the space agency’s ambitious ₹ 600 crore mission.
Chandrayaan-3 is the third and most recent lunar Indian Space Research exploration mission under the Chandrayaan programme.
It consists of a lander named Vikram and a rover named Pragyan similar to Chandrayaan-2, but does not have an orbiter. Its propulsion module behaves like a communication relay satellite.
