India’s lunar triumph | The Straits Times

It was fairly obvious that the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) was confident. You don’t include a window showing the Prime Minister’s real-time reaction in the live YouTube feed of your lunar landing unless you think you are going to give him something to smile about.

Even so, the poise with which Chandrayaan-3’s “automatic landing sequence” brought the spacecraft down on to the Moon’s surface was striking. The spacecraft’s trajectory dropped smoothly from thousands of kilometres an hour to walking pace, before a last little cheeky hover as the system checked the landing site and then settled itself down onto the lunar surface. India did not just land its robot on the Moon. It did it with style.

It was fairly obvious that the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) was confident. You don’t include a window showing the Prime Minister’s real-time reaction in the live YouTube feed of your lunar landing unless you think you are going to give him something to smile about.

Even so, the poise with which Chandrayaan-3’s “automatic landing sequence” brought the spacecraft down on to the Moon’s surface was striking. The spacecraft’s trajectory dropped smoothly from thousands of kilometres an hour to walking pace, before a last little cheeky hover as the system checked the landing site and then settled itself down onto the lunar surface. India did not just land its robot on the Moon. It did it with style.