A Nasa spacecraft has successfully pinged the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro's) Chandrayaan-3 on the lunar surface.

According to the US space agency, a laser beam was transmitted and reflected between an orbiting Nasa spacecraft and the Vikram lander on the lunar surface.

The success of the experiment paves the way for precisely locating targets on the Moon’s surface, Nasa said.

Notably, Chandrayaan-3 made a historic landing on the moon on August 23. The lander module, named Vikram, and the rover, Pragyan, touched down on the Shiva Shakti Point in the South Polar Region of the Moon.

"At 3 pm EST (local time) on December 12, 2023, NASA’s LRO (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter) pointed its laser altimeter instrument toward Vikram. The lander was 62 miles, or 100 kilometers, away from LRO, near Manzinus crater in the Moon’s South Pole region, when LRO transmitted laser pulses toward it. After the orbiter registered light that had bounced back from a tiny NASA retroreflector aboard Vikram, NASA scientists knew their technique had finally worked," Nasa said in a statement.

According to Nasa, sending laser pulses toward an object and measuring how long it takes the light to bounce back is a commonly used way to track the locations of Earth-orbiting satellites from the ground.

But using the technique in reverse--to send laser pulses from a moving spacecraft to a stationary one to determine its precise location--has many applications at the Moon, it added.

"We’ve showed that we can locate our retroreflector on the surface from the Moon’s orbit," the statement from Nasa quoted scientist Xiaoli Sun as saying.

Notably, Sun led a team at Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, that developed the retroreflector on Vikram as part of a partnership between Nasa and Isro.

"The next step is to improve the technique so that it can become routine for missions that want to use these retroreflectors in the future," the US space agency further quoted him as saying.