Chandrayaan-1

…director for India’s lunar probes Chandrayaan-1 and Chandrayaan-2. Chandrayaan-1 was launched from Sriharikota Island, India, on October 22, 2008, by a PSLV-C11 launch vehicle. It had a mass at liftoff of 1,380 kg (3,042 pounds), including a 55-kg (121-pound) payload that contained 11 scientific instruments from India and several other…

…to confirm the Indian probe Chandrayaan-1’s finding of small amounts of water on the lunar surface.

Chandrayaan-1 (chandrayaan is Hindi for “moon craft”), the first lunar space probe of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), found water on the Moon. It mapped the Moon in infrared, visible, and X-ray light from lunar orbit and used reflected radiation to

to the Moon (Chandrayaan-1, 2008; Chandrayaan-2, 2019; Chandrayaan-3, 2023) as well as the Mars Orbiter Mission (2013), India’s first mission to Mars. On January 16, 2025, ISRO successfully completed the SpaDeX mission, marking India’s first demonstration of space docking. This achievement makes India the fourth country after the