Chandrayaan-3 Landed at 18:04 on 23 August 2023 for ₹615 Crore, and the 103 Metres Its Rover Drove Have Since Produced a Nature Paper

Vikram, the lander of Chandrayaan-3, touched down at 18:04 Indian time on 23 August 2023, at 69.37 degrees south and 32.35 degrees east, according to the release ISRO issued with the Physical Research Laboratory (PRL) on its rover’s X-ray results. NASA puts the site about 600 kilometres from the Moon’s south pole. The agency’s then administrator, Bill Nelson, posted that India was the fourth country to soft-land a spacecraft on the Moon, and he named the south polar landing in the same message.

The lander’s Indian-built rover, Pragyan, drove about 103 metres over the next ten days, per the PRL release, and the numbers from its two instruments are still being published.

What went wrong in 2019, and what ISRO changed

Chandrayaan-2’s lander tried the same descent in September 2019 and hit the surface hard. The government’s written reply to the Lok Sabha, reported on 21 November 2019, says the first phase of the descent went as designed, from 30 kilometres altitude to 7.4 kilometres, with speed falling from 1,683 metres per second to 146. In the second phase the velocity reduction exceeded the design value, which left conditions at the start of the final “fine braking” outside the designed limits. The lander came down within 500 metres of the intended site.

The Week reported on 16 November 2019 that a national committee headed by V. Narayanan of the Liquid Propulsion Systems Centre had analysed the failure. Citing an internal report presented to the Space Commission, it attributed the crash to guidance software. The government’s reply to Parliament named the velocity reduction instead. tuput could not find a published copy of the committee’s report.

Ahead of the 2023 launch, ISRO chairman S. Somanath said the agency was moving from a “success-based design” in Chandrayaan-2 to a “failure-based design” in Chandrayaan-3, according to ETV Bharat. He said the landing area was widened from 500 metres by 500 metres, and that the lander carried more fuel. ISRO’s mission page lists the prime landing site as roughly 4 kilometres by 2.4 kilometres, with touchdown limits of 2 metres per second vertically, 0.5 metres per second sideways and a 12 degree slope.

The descent

The LVM3 M4 rocket launched Chandrayaan-3 from Sriharikota on 14 July 2023. The lander module separated from the propulsion module on 17 August. ISRO’s page scheduled powered descent to begin around 17:45 on 23 August, so the final approach took roughly 19 minutes from that planned start to touchdown.

The lander module weighed 1,752 kilograms including the 26 kg rover. ISRO gives the total mass of the integrated spacecraft as 3,900 kg.

On 26 August, at the ISRO command centre in Bengaluru, Prime Minister Narendra Modi named the landing site Shiv Shakti Point and the Chandrayaan-2 crash site Tiranga Point, according to All India Radio. He also announced that 23 August would be observed as National Space Day.

Two instruments on a 26 kg rover

Pragyan carried a laser-induced breakdown spectroscope (LIBS), built at ISRO’s Laboratory for Electro-Optics Systems in Bengaluru, and an alpha particle X-ray spectrometer (APXS), built at PRL in Ahmedabad. The rover could talk only to the lander, and its design life was one lunar day, about 14 Earth days. Vikram carried three instruments of its own, ChaSTE for temperature, ILSA for ground vibration and RAMBHA-LP for the plasma near the surface, along with a NASA reflector.

Sulphur, soil and heat

ISRO reported on 28 August 2023 that LIBS had made the first in-situ elemental measurements near the lunar south pole. It said they confirmed sulphur there, which instruments in orbit could not do. The first list also named aluminium, calcium, iron, chromium and titanium, and later readings added manganese, silicon and oxygen. Hydrogen was still under investigation at that point. India’s first Moon mission, Chandrayaan-1, had carried the NASA instrument that detected water and hydroxyl on the surface in 2009.

The APXS results took a year to reach Nature. PRL and ISRO reported on 21 August 2024 that the instrument made 23 measurements along the rover’s path, for about 31 hours of total exposure. The soil was fairly uniform. It was a mix of ferroan anorthosite, a rock rich in the mineral plagioclase, and a magnesium-rich group of rocks. The authors read the first as support for the lunar magma ocean idea, in which the early Moon was molten and light minerals floated to form the crust. They attribute the magnesium-rich part to material thrown out of the South Pole-Aitken basin, which formed about 4.2 to 4.3 billion years ago, according to the PRL release. The site is about 350 kilometres from that basin’s rim.

A second APXS paper, in Communications Earth and Environment in 2025, gives the volatile figures. ISRO’s summary says sulphur ran at 900 to 1,400 parts per million, 300 to 500 parts per million above Apollo 16 and Luna 20 highland soils, while sodium (700 to 2,800) and potassium (300 to 400) were lower. The authors propose that the basin impact dug up sulphur-rich material from the Moon’s mantle.

ChaSTE, whose probe has ten temperature sensors reaching 10 centimetres into the soil, ran from 24 August to 2 September 2023. ISRO’s account of the March 2025 paper says the surface peaked at 355 kelvin, about 82 degrees Celsius, where orbiter data had suggested about 330 kelvin. The probe stood on a sun-facing slope of about 6 degrees. A sensor on flat ground a metre away read about 332 kelvin, about 59 degrees Celsius. The authors’ models suggest slopes facing the pole and steeper than 14 degrees could hold water ice a few tens of centimetres down.

ISRO’s science page reports an estimate by scientists at its National Remote Sensing Centre that the landing threw out about 2.06 tonnes of epiregolith, the loose top layer of lunar soil, and lists a displaced area of 108.4 square metres. NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter photographed the lander on 27 August and attributes the bright halo to the rocket plume hitting the fine soil.

The hop

After about ten Earth days of experiments, ISRO says, the lander fired its engines again on 2 September 2023 and hopped about 50 centimetres, using leftover propellant. ISRO’s page, dated May 2026, says the exhaust cleared about 3 centimetres of loose dust and exposed older, more compacted ground. ChaSTE readings then showed a two-layer structure. At 6.5 centimetres deep, density roughly doubles, from 750 to 1,600 kilograms per cubic metre, and cohesion rises from 300 to 1,600 pascals. The paper is by K. Durga Prasad and colleagues at PRL in The Astrophysical Journal.

ISRO’s mission page says the lander and rover then entered sleep mode, with wake-up expected around 22 September. Its last entry, dated 22 September 2023, says efforts to establish communication were under way.

The module that came home

The propulsion module, which had carried the lander into lunar orbit, still had more than 100 kilograms of fuel. ISRO used it to practise a return trip. A burn on 9 October 2023 raised the high point of its lunar orbit from 150 to 5,112 kilometres. A trans-Earth injection burn on 13 October put it on a path home, and after four flybys of the Moon it left the Moon’s sphere of influence on 10 November. Its first perigee, the nearest point to Earth, came on 22 November at about 1.54 lakh kilometres (154,000 km), in an orbit of nearly 13 days. ISRO says the aim was to test methods for a future sample-return mission and to avoid leaving debris on the Moon, and the module’s Earth-watching instrument, SHAPE, kept observing.

What it cost

The Press Information Bureau’s New India Samachar magazine reported in September 2023 that ₹601.34 crore had been spent on Chandrayaan-3 through June 2023, including the launch rocket, and that the full budget was ₹615 crore. Our piece on ISRO’s budgets sets that figure beside the Mars mission’s. Ten days after the landing, ISRO launched Aditya-L1 to study the Sun.

The reflector that is still in use

On 12 December 2023, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter aimed its laser altimeter at the NASA reflector on Vikram, about 100 kilometres away, and on the eighth attempt picked up the return. NASA calls it the first time a laser beam has gone between an orbiter and a device on the Moon’s surface and back. NASA says the reflector needs no power or maintenance and can last for decades.