🛰️ Mission
Chandrayaan-1
India’s first mission to the Moon, and it found water.
- Launched
- 22 October 2008, 18 years ago
- Worked for
- 10 months, until 29 August 2009
- Built by
- ISRO, with instruments from NASA and ESA
- Where it is
- Still circling the Moon, silent since the day it stopped answering
- Best known for
- Found water locked in the Moon’s soil, and ice in the craters at its poles, which everyone had thought bone dry
Did you know?
- Its NASA instrument, the Moon Mineralogy Mapper, is what spotted the water. The mission that carried it was India’s.
- It also dropped a small probe onto the south pole on purpose, which photographed its own fall all the way down.
Where it went
The Moon
Earth’s only natural moon, and the only other world people have walked on.
More NASA photos of Chandrayaan-1Straight from NASA’s image library, in the app
Explore more
All of missions
Hubble Space Telescope
Thirty-six years above the weather, and still working.
James Webb Space Telescope
A golden mirror that sees the first galaxies in infrared.
Chandra X-ray Observatory
The telescope that shows what is hot and violent.
Spitzer Space Telescope
Sixteen years of infrared, through dust that hides everything else.
Kepler
Stared at one patch of sky and found thousands of planets.
TESS
Kepler’s successor, watching the whole sky for planets.