Moon Impact Probe Lands on the Moon

14 November 2008

The Moon Impact Probe (MIP) separated from Chandrayaan-1 at 14:36 UTC and, after a 25-minute controlled descent, struck the lunar surface at 15:01 UTC near the crater Shackleton at the south pole. The impact site was named Jawahar Point, coinciding with the birth anniversary of Jawaharlal Nehru.

Carrying an image of the Indian flag on its sides, the MIP made India the fourth nation — after the Soviet Union, the United States and Japan — to place its flag insignia on the Moon.

During descent, the probe's video imaging system captured close-range pictures of the surface, its radar altimeter measured altitude for future soft-landing technology, and its CHACE mass spectrometer sampled the thin lunar atmosphere — data that later provided direct evidence of water on the Moon.

Source: Wikipedia — Moon Impact Probe