India's space agency on Friday launched its third moon mission, aiming to land a lunar rover on the surface.
The uncrewed Chandrayaan-3 mission saw the LVM3 rocket blast off from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre on Friday morning.
On board the rocket is a lander vehicle named Vikram containing the Pragyan lunar rover, with the Indian Space Research Organisation is looking to touch down in late August.
If successful it would be the first successful landing on the lunar surface in more than 50 years, following the last NASA's Apollo 17 mission in 1972, also cementing India in an exclusive club along with the US, Soviet Union and China.
The Goonhilly Earth Station, collaborating with the European Space Agency, is helping with ground station support communications for the spacecraft, along with the US space agency NASA.
LVM3 M4/Chandrayaan-3 Mission:
LVM3 M4 vehicle???? successfully launched Chandrayaan-3????️ into orbit.
— ISRO (@isro) July 14, 2023
Since then there have been a succession of unsuccessful attempts, most recently April's close-run effort by Japanese private company iSpace, which ended in a crash-landing.
India's previous effort, the Chandrayaan 2 mission in 2019, also finished when a software glitch led to it also crashing into the moon's surface, though that mission included a lunar orbiter that is still operational today.
The LVM3 rocket will carry the lander to a 100 km lunar orbit, where it will detach and then circle the Earth at least five times to get the slingshot effect to reach the moon.
Once Vikram has landed, the six-wheeled Pragyan rover will carry two payloads onto the surface – spectrometers that will look for interesting materials.
The lander will include a number of payloads, including the Spectro-polarimetry of Habitable Planet Earth (SHAPE) device to measure radiation to try and understand what habitable Earth-like planets could look like, and a passive laser retroreflector array from NASA for lunar laser ranging studies.