🔥 India launches historic Chandrayaan-3 mission to land spacecraft on the moon 🔥 -------------------------------- ❌❌❌ India is bidding to become only the fourth country to execute a controlled landing on the moon with the successful launch Friday of its Chandrayaan-3 mission. ✔ Chandrayaan, which means “moon vehicle” in Sanskrit, blasted off from the Satish Dhawan Space Center at Sriharikota in southern Andhra Pradesh state at just after 2:30 p.m. local time (5 a.m. ET). ✔ Crowds gathered at the space center to watch the history-making launch and more than 1 million people tuned in to watch on YouTube. ✔ It’s India’s second attempt at a soft landing, after its previous effort with the Chandrayaan-2 in 2019 failed. Its first lunar probe, the Chandrayaan-1, orbited the moon and was then deliberately crash-landed onto the lunar surface in 2008. ✔ Developed by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), Chandrayaan-3 is comprised of a lander, propulsion module and rover. Its aim is to safely land on the lunar surface, collect data and conduct a series of scientific experiments to learn more about the moon’s composition. ✔ Only three other countries have achieved the complicated feat of soft-landing a spacecraft on the moon’s surface – the United States, Russia and China. ✔ Indian engineers have been working on the launch for years. They are aiming to land Chandrayaan-3 near the challenging terrain of the moon’s unexplored South Pole. ✔ India’s maiden lunar mission, Chandrayaan-1, discovered water molecules on the moon’s surface. Eleven years later, the Chandrayaan-2 successfully entered lunar orbit but its rover crash-landed on the moon’s surface. It too was supposed to explore the moon’s South Pole. ✔ At the time, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi hailed the engineers behind the mission despite the failure, promising to keep working on India’s space program and ambitions. ✔ Just before Friday’s launch, Modi said the day “will always be etched in golden letters as far as India’s space sector is concerned.” ✔ “This remarkable mission will carry the hopes and dreams of our nation,” he said in a Twitter post. ✔ India has since spent about $75 million on its Chandrayaan-3 mission. ✔ Modi said the rocket will cover more than 300,000 kilometers (186,411 miles) and reach the moon in the “coming weeks.” Cre: CNN