India's Lander Touches Down on the Moon. Russia's Has Crashed

Today, India's Chandrayaan-3 became the first spacecraft to successfully land near the lunar south pole, and India became the fourth country to make a soft landing anywhere on lunar soil, following the former Soviet Union, the United States, and China. The robotic vehicle touched down at 8:33 Eastern time, nearly six weeks after its launch. The craft includes a four-legged lander and a small rover to study the lunar regolith and look for signs of water ice during a two-week mission. On August 20, the craft malfunctioned and appears to have crashed while preparing for a landing planned for the next day. Roscosmos, Russia's space agency, intended to deploy Luna-25 for a year-long mission near the Boguslavsky impact crater, where its eight scientific instruments would also have examined properties of the regolith and pockets of water ice.