Joining the Club

India's Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft snapped this image of the farside of the Moon on August 19. The craft dropped a lander onto the surface on August 23. It deployed a rover the following day. The Vikram lander made India just the fourth country to successfully place a spacecraft on the Moon, after the Soviet Union, United States, and China. A Russian lander, Luna 25, crashed while attempting a landing on August 19. It was the Russian/Soviet Union's first lunar mission since Luna 24, in 1976. A lander built by a Japanese company crashed earlier this year. Vikram landed near the Moon's south pole, where large amounts of ice could be frozen at the bottoms of permanently shadowed craters. [Indian Space Research Organization]