The moon rover of India’s Chandrayaan-3 has exited the spacecraft to begin its exploration of the lunar surface, the country’s space agency said on messaging platform X, formerly known as Twitter.
The spacecraft landed on the unexplored south pole of the moon on Wednesday evening, days after Russia’s Luna-25 failed, making India the first country to achieve that feat.
“The Ch-3 Rover ramped down from the Lander and India took a walk on the moon!” the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) said in its message on Thursday morning.
The six-wheeled, solar-powered rover, named Pragyan (or wisdom” in Sanskrit) will amble around the relatively unmapped region and transmit images and scientific data over its two-week lifespan.
Accomplished with a budget of about 6.15bn Indian rupees ($74.58m), this was India’s second attempt to touch down on the moon. A previous mission in 2019, Chandrayaan-2, successfully deployed an orbiter but its lander crashed.
Original from www.aljazeera.com