India succeeded in landing two robots, a lander named Vikram and a rover named Pragyan on the southern polar region of the moon, and made India the first country to ever reach this part of the lunar surface in one piece and the fourth country ever to land on the moon.

ISRO chairman S Somanth said “ India is on the moon, we have achieved soft landing on the moon on Wednesday”. India has routinely orbited the moon and Mars and launches satellites above the Earth with far fewer financial resources than other space-faring nations.

Prayers were offered for the mission’s success at Hindu temples, Sikh Gurdwaras, and Muslim mosques, Schools also held ceremonies. After 11.5 minutes the lander was just over 4.5 miles above the surface and started rotating from a  horizontal to a vertical  position while continuing its descent. The spacecraft stopped to hover about 150 yards or 137 meters  above the surface for a few seconds, then resumed its downward journey until it settled gently on the surface, about 370 miles from the south pole. The landing sequence took about 10 minutes. Chandrayaan-3 is a scientific mission, timed for a two-week period when the sun will shine on the landing site and provide energy for the solar-powered lander and rover, which both uses  a range of instruments to make thermal, scismic and mineralogical measurements. Before India has never sent people to space on its own,  although an Indian astronaut flew to orbit on a Soviet spacecraft in 1984.  India’s first astronaut mission called Gaganyaan, although the project, which aims to send three Indian astronauts to space on the country’s own spacecraft, has faced delays and ISRO has not announced a launch date till now.

India is working on launching a solar observatory called Aditya -L1, in early September, and later an Earth observation satellite built jointly with NASA. A younger generation of space engineers, inspired by SpaceX, Elon Musk’s company have started going into business on their own.