Vikram Lander soft-landed on Moon again! 🌚 oh yes you heard it right. Days after Chandrayaan-3's successful moon landing, the Vikram Lander has made a touchdown on the lunar surface again, the Indian space agency said today.

"Vikram Lander has exceeded Chandrayaan-3 mission objectives and successfully completed a "hop experiment"," said the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).

"On command, it fired the engines, elevated itself by about 40 cm as expected and landed safely at a distance of 30 - 40 cm away," ISRO said.

ISRO said this achievement "kickstart enthuses future sample return and human missions."

The space agency said that Vikram's systems are healthy and performed nominally. "Vikram's systems deployed ramp, equipment folded back and redeployed successfully after the experiment," it said.

The successful soft-landing of the Vikram Lander and the hop mission shows the capability of the Chandrayaan-3 system to lift-off from the surface of the Moon, effectively meaning that a future mission could be developed that could return samples from the lunar surface to India.

This successful maneuver is expected to open up new possibilities for future lunar sample returns and human missions to the moon.

Several countries in the world, including the US and China, have that capability. While Nasa's Apollo mission was the first to return samples from the surface of the Moon, China's space agency also possesses similar technology.

Source: IndiaToday