On October 22, 2008, India launched its first mission to the Moon, Chandrayaan-1, on a rocket from the Satish Dhawan space centre at Sriharikota on the east coast. The spacecraft weighed about 1.4 tonnes and carried eleven instruments, some of them supplied by other countries, and it entered an orbit around the Moon in November 2008. The craft was small. The mission made India the fourth country to put a probe around the Moon.
The mission had two parts. The main craft stayed in orbit and mapped the surface, and a small impact probe, carrying a flag, was released and fired into the south polar region, where it sent back measurements before it struck. The instruments studied the minerals of the surface, the radiation environment and the thin lunar atmosphere, and the mission sent back thousands of images. The craft used its own engine and the gravity of the Moon to move gradually into a tighter orbit.
The most discussed result came in 2009, when an instrument supplied by the United States found signs of water molecules and of hydroxyl in the soil, and the finding was later supported by a second instrument, and a probe that was deliberately crashed into a dark crater threw up material containing frozen water. The finding was new. That changed the accepted picture of a dry Moon and made the poles of special interest for later missions.
Contact with the spacecraft was lost in August 2009, well before the planned two year life, and a later study concluded that a fault in the power system had caused it to overheat. The mission was still counted as a success, and it was followed by further Indian lunar craft, including an orbiter in 2019 and a lander that touched down near the south pole in 2023. The work went on.