With the success of the Chandrayaan-3 mission on 23 August 2023, India became the fourth country to successfully land a spacecraft on the Moon. India’s spacecraft, which includes a moon landing module and a mobile exploration robot, landed near the star’s South Pole, in a world first. India successfully launched its lunar program in 2008, with the successful probe into the Chandrayaan-1 impact.
The Soviet Union and later the United States, with the Luna 9 and Surveyor 1 space probes, both soft-landed on the Moon for the first time in 1966. Although the Soviet Union dominated at the start of the space race, the United States remained the only nation to make first landing on the Moon. the country that has landed astronauts on our natural satellite (5 times between 1969 and 1972), but this may change in the future, as the race to the Moon has only recently begun to show a turning point.
After dropping out of the space agency’s priority in the 1980s and 2000s, the Moon is now back in the limelight. In 2013, China became the third country to achieve a controlled moon landing (Chang’e 3 mission), before repeating the feat in 2018, this time for the first time on the far side of the Moon (Chang’e 4 mission).
Although Russia just missed its chance to return to the Moon after the crash of the Luna 25 probe on Aug. 20, the next country to try to land on our natural satellite is Japan. The Japanese space agency (JAXA) is preparing to launch its SLIM (lander) mission to the moon on August 26.
