Vikram lander touches down at lunar south pole shortly after 6pm India time
India has become the first country to successfully land a spacecraft near the south pole of the moon, in a historic moment that drew cheers at watching parties around the country.
“India is on the moon,” Sreedhara Panicker Somanath, the chair of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), said as the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft’s Vikram lander touched down shortly after 6pm (1230 BST) near the little-explored lunar south pole in a world first for any space programme.