Orbiter operational · launched 2019

Chandrayaan-2

India's first attempt at a soft lunar landing — and an orbiter that is still doing world-class science today.

Chandrayaan-2 is the second lunar exploration mission developed by ISRO, after Chandrayaan-1. It consists of a lunar orbiter, the Vikram lander and the Pragyan rover, all developed in India. The main scientific objective is to map and study variations in lunar surface composition, as well as the location and abundance of lunar water.

The spacecraft was launched from the second launch pad at Satish Dhawan Space Centre on 22 July 2019 at 09:13 UTC by a GSLV Mark III-M1. It reached lunar orbit on 20 August 2019 and began positioning manoeuvres for the landing of Vikram, targeted at about 70° south latitude. However, the lander deviated from its intended trajectory during the final descent on 6 September 2019 and crashed; a failure analysis committee attributed the crash to a software glitch. Read the full account on the Loss of Vikram lander page.

History

On 12 November 2007, Roscosmos and ISRO signed an agreement to work together on Chandrayaan-2 — ISRO taking responsibility for the orbiter and rover, Roscosmos the lander. The Indian government approved the mission on 18 September 2008. After Russia was unable to deliver the lander (following the Fobos-Grunt failure), India decided in 2013 to develop the mission fully independently; unused orbiter hardware was repurposed for the Mars Orbiter Mission (Mangalyaan) — see our sister site for that story. After several delays and an aborted attempt on 15 July 2019, launch took place on 22 July 2019 on the first operational flight of the GSLV Mk III.

The orbiter today

While the lander was lost, the Chandrayaan-2 orbiter has been a resounding success. Key facts as of 2026:

Its precise launch and orbital insertion left enough fuel for roughly seven and a half years of extended operation, far beyond the planned one year.
It carries the sharpest camera ever sent to the Moon — the Orbiter High Resolution Camera (OHRC), resolving details of about 25 cm. In February 2026, ISRO used OHRC imagery to select Chandrayaan-4's landing site on the summit of Mons Mouton.
It served as a communications relay for Chandrayaan-3, whose lander touched down successfully on 23 August 2023.
Its DFSAR radar has detected signatures of possible subsurface water ice near the lunar south pole — most recently, a study published in May 2026 (and highlighted by ISRO in June 2026) found buried-ice signatures in four "doubly shadowed" craters inside the Faustini, Haworth and Shoemaker craters. CLASS/XSM have produced global elemental maps and solar X-ray studies.
It has performed collision-avoidance manoeuvres, including one on 18 October 2021 to avoid NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

What happened next: the lessons of Chandrayaan-2 fed directly into Chandrayaan-3, which on 23 August 2023 made India the first nation to land near the lunar south pole and the fourth to soft-land on the Moon.

Source: Wikipedia — Chandrayaan-2