Chandrayaan-3

Chandrayaan-3 was a follow-on to Chandrayaan-2, designed to demonstrate safe landing and rover mobility, and to conduct in-situ lunar science. It comprised a propulsion module, the Vikram lander, and the 26-kilogram Pragyan rover housed inside the lander. The propulsion module transported the lander to lunar orbit; it was not a dedicated lunar orbiter. The mission was launched aboard India's LVM3 rocket from Satish Dhawan Space Centre on 14 July 2023.

Vikram made a soft landing on 23 August 2023 at a site around 69° south latitude, in the Moon's southern high-latitude region. Pragyan then rolled down a ramp to the surface. ISRO planned the lander and rover for a mission life of one lunar day, about 14 Earth days; they were solar-powered and not designed to operate through the lunar night. The landing demonstrated India's capacity for a controlled lunar touchdown and surface rover deployment.

The lander carried instruments to measure the near-surface plasma environment, soil thermal properties and local seismic activity, as well as a passive laser retroreflector for lunar ranging. Pragyan carried an Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer (APXS) and a Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscope (LIBS) to investigate the composition of nearby lunar material. An analysis of 23 APXS measurements reported that soil around the landing site was relatively compositionally uniform and primarily ferroan anorthosite, with measured magnesium relative to calcium indicating admixture of more mafic material. These observations provide local measurements, not a complete characterization of the Moon's surface.

The mission combined an engineering objective—landing and deploying a rover—with surface science in a region from which there had previously been no comparable in-situ measurements of elemental abundances at such high southern latitude. Its measurements have been used to test ideas about lunar crust formation and to provide ground truth for remote sensing. Chandrayaan-3's landing is a milestone in India's space programme, while the broader interpretation of the Moon's formation continues to draw on evidence from many missions and samples.