Chandrayaan-1
India's first lunar exploration mission
Chandrayaan-1 (; from Sanskrit: Chandra, "Moon" and yāna, "craft, vehicle") of the Chandrayaan programme, was the first Indian lunar probe. It was launched by ISRO in October 2008, and operated until August 2009. The mission consisted of an orbiter and an impactor. ISRO launched the spacecraft using a PSLV-XL (C-11) rocket on 22 October 2008 at 00:52 UTC from Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SDSC), at Sriharikota, Andhra Pradesh. The mission was a major boost to India's space program, as India researched and developed its own technology to explore the Moon. The vehicle was inserted into lunar orbit on 8 November 2008.
On 14 November 2008, the Moon Impact Probe separated from the Chandrayaan orbiter at 14:36 UTC and struck the south pole in a controlled manner. The probe hit near the crater Shackleton at 15:01 UTC. The location of the impact was named Jawahar Point. With this mission, ISRO became the fifth national space agency to reach the lunar surface. Other nations whose national space agencies achieved similar feats were the former Soviet Union in 1959, the United States in 1962, Japan in 1993, and European Space Agency member states in 2006.
The public source identifies “Chandrayaan-1” as india's first lunar exploration mission. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Chandrayaan-1, India's and first.
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This entry incorporates text from “Chandrayaan-1” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.