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On this day in space! Oct. 21, 2008: India launches its 1st mission to the moon with Chandrayaan-1
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- DeepHorus
India launched its first mission to the moon on Oct. 21, 2008, when the Indian Space Research Organisation sent Chandrayaan-1 into space from the Satish Dhawan Space Center. The spacecraft lifted off at 8:52 p.m. EDT — 6:22 a.m. local time on Oct. 22 — aboard an Indian Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle, or PSLV-XL. The mission, India's first deep space venture, consisted of both a lunar orbiter and an impactor.
Chandrayaan-1 took about three weeks to reach the moon, entering lunar orbit on Nov. 8, 2008. Five days later, on Nov. 14, it released the Moon Impact Probe, which crashed into the lunar surface as planned. The remaining orbiter stayed in orbit and transmitted data back to Earth for roughly a year.
The spacecraft carried 11 scientific instruments to study the moon, five of them built by ISRO. The rest were experiments supplied by the European Space Agency and NASA, with equipment from the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden and Bulgaria. In September 2009, scientists published data from the American M3 instrument showing absorption features at the lunar poles typically linked to hydroxyl- and water-bearing molecules — evidence of water ice on the moon.
The findings gave India's space program a major scientific victory and proved the country could reach the moon. ISRO had considerable prestige riding on the mission, which came as India pursued ambitions to launch its own crewed spacecraft and build a space station.
Contact with Chandrayaan-1 was lost in August 2009, most likely because of a power supply failure caused by overheating, ending the mission 14 months ahead of its planned two-year lifetime. NASA noted that ISRO reported at least 95% of the mission's objectives had been accomplished by then.
India continued its lunar program after Chandrayaan-1. The Chandrayaan-2 orbiter reached lunar orbit in 2019, though its Vikram lander failed, and Chandrayaan-3 successfully landed a new Vikram lander and Pragyan rover near the moon's south pole in 2023. India now plans to launch Chandrayaan-4 to return moon samples to Earth in 2028.
