BENGALURU: Three Lunar missions in 15 years! It seems the Moon truly beckons ISRO. And why not? Scientists found frozen water deposits in the darkest and coldest parts of the Moon’s polar regions for the first time using data from the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft in 2009.

Chandrayaan-1, India’s first mission to the Moon, was launched on October 22, 2008 from Sriharikota spaceport in Andhra Pradesh. The spacecraft, carrying 11 scientific instruments built in India, the USA, the UK, Germany, Sweden and Bulgaria, orbited around the Moon at a height of 100 km from the lunar surface for chemical, mineralogical and photo-geologic mapping of the Moon.

After the successful completion of all the major mission objectives, the orbit was raised to 200 km in May 2009. The satellite made more than 3,400 orbits around the Moon.