[Business Insider] India on Wednesday achieved a historic feat in the history of space exploration: landing a robot on the moon’s south pole.
“India is now on the Moon,” said Indian prime Minister Narendra Modi from South Africa, as engineers celebrated the nation’s Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft landing on the south pole of the moon.
With the landing, India became the first country to touch down on what is thought to be the most water-rich region on the moon — a feat that has stumped other nations like Russia, who crashed its lander on the moon Saturday.
The landing means India beat Russia, China and the US, who have all announced missions to the south pole.
Whoever can mine that water-ice and break it down into oxygen and hydrogen, will then have the resources to lead future space exploration including building crewed bases on the moon and manufacturing rocket fuel for missions to Mars and beyond.
This is “a pretty significant achievement,” Robert Braun, head of the Space Exploration Center at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, told Insider.
