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Days after leading the country’s elite space agency to do the most difficult task in the world of landing a spacecraft on the most difficult terrain on the lunar south pole where nobody has ventured before, Isro chairman S Somanath said on Sunday that India has the “best picture of the Moon”.

Somanath told the media in Thiruvananthapuram, “We have the closest picture of the real regolith. They are precious commodities and they are not available anywhere in the world. Nobody has such close-proximity photos. They will all come but a little later because they all have to come to our computer centre, Indian Spacecraft and Exploration Mission Data Centre. From there, scientists will take and do a huge amount of valuation.”

The Chandrayaan-3 rover has covered a distance of 8 metres on the lunar surface and the two science experiments it was carrying have been switched on, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) confirmed on Friday evening. The rover is capable of travelling a total distance of 500 metres.

A two-segment foldable ramp on the lander helped the rover roll out with an attached cord. The cord was retracted after the rover touched down.As it was rolling out, a solar panel was also opened up allowing the rover to generate 50W power for its journey.

Russian state-run news agencies on Wednesday said that Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner group that led a mutiny against Russia’s army in June, was on the list of passengers of a plane that crashed.

“The plane that crashed in the Tver Region listed Yevgeny Prigozhin among its passengers, (Russia’s aviation agency) Rosaviatsia said,” TASS news agency reported, with RIA Novosti and Interfax issuing similar reports.

India on Wednesday scripted history by becoming the first country in the world to reach the uncharted territory of the Moon. The Indian Space Research Organisation's spacecraft Chandrayaan-3 touched down on the lunar south pole at 6.04 pm, making India the first country to land on the Moon's unexplored surface. With this 'monumental moment', India also became the fourth country to master the technology of soft-landing on the Moon after the United States, China and the erstwhile Soviet Union.

Chandrayaan-3: S Somanath played key role in India's moon mission

One of the key functionaries in the Chandrayaan-3 mission is ISRO chief S Somanath. The 60-year-old guided the Chandrayaan-3 team, which had Dr P Veeramuthuvel as Project Director, K Kalpana as Associate Project Director, and M Srikanth as Mission Operations Director. 

With the Chandrayaan-3 lander's soft landing on Moon scheduled at 6.04pm on Wednesday, brother-in-arms Nasa and European Space Agency (ESA), which have been continuously lending support to Isro in tracking the spacecraft during its 3.84 lakh km journey to the Moon from the Earth, will on Wednesday play a key role in communicating with the lander module during the final descent phase.