India’s major space missions include three Chandrayaan flights to the Moon, a successful Mars orbiter, and two programs still in development: the crewed Gaganyaan spacecraft and a planned space station. The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is behind them all, with a public record that includes a lunar crash, a lunar landing no other country had achieved, and a first-attempt insertion into Mars orbit. This page focuses on what each mission did, or aims to do. For details on ISRO’s budget and rocket fleet, see the India space program overview.
Chandrayaan-1 Found Evidence of Water on the Moon
Chandrayaan-1 was India’s first mission beyond Earth orbit, launched in October 2008. It carried the Moon Impact Probe, a small instrument package that deliberately struck the lunar surface, along with a payload that included NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper. Data returned during the 2008-2009 mission produced some of the strongest evidence yet found for water molecules across the Moon’s surface, a result published in 2009 that reshaped scientific thinking about ice trapped in permanently shadowed polar craters. Mission controllers lost contact with the orbiter in August 2009, cutting the mission short of its planned two-year run, but the water-detection result had already reached publication by then.
Chandrayaan-2’s Lander Crashed but Its Orbiter Kept Working
Chandrayaan-2, launched in July 2019, carried three parts: an orbiter, the Vikram lander, and the Pragyan rover tucked inside it. The plan called for Vikram to soft-land near the lunar south pole and deploy Pragyan to study the surrounding soil. That plan failed during the final phase of descent in September 2019, when Vikram lost communication and crashed rather than landing intact.
The orbiter fared better. It separated from the lander before descent and reached its planned orbit around the Moon without incident. ISRO has kept it operating since, using its instruments to map the lunar surface and relaying communications and data for later missions passing through the same region, including the Chandrayaan-3 mission that followed four years later.
Chandrayaan-3 Landed Near the Lunar South Pole
Chandrayaan-3 soft-landed near the Moon’s south pole on August 23, 2023, a success that rebuilt on Chandrayaan-2’s failed attempt rather than starting from scratch. The landing made India the fourth country to achieve a soft lunar landing, after the Soviet Union, the United States, and China, and the first country to reach that specific south polar region. No earlier lander from any nation had touched down that far south.
The mission’s Vikram lander and Pragyan rover carried a compact set of science instruments rather than a large payload. One instrument measured temperature just beneath the lunar soil at the landing site. Another detected a moonquake, a small seismic event recorded directly at the landing location. The rover drove short distances across the surface near the lander, sending back images and surface-composition readings. Both craft went dormant once the two-week lunar night set in. Their solar-powered design had anticipated that from the start.
Mangalyaan Reached Mars Orbit on the First Attempt
Mangalyaan, ISRO’s Mars Orbiter Mission, launched in November 2013 aboard a Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) rocket and entered orbit around Mars in September 2014. That insertion made India the first Asian nation to reach Mars. It was also the first Mars orbit insertion any nation had ever succeeded at on its first attempt, a bar that had tripped up better-funded programs before it. The orbiter carried a compact instrument suite rather than a large payload, including a Mars Color Camera that returned some of the mission’s most widely circulated images.
Mangalyaan operated for years past its originally planned six-month mission life, continuing to return data and imagery through the following decade. ISRO reported losing contact with the orbiter in 2022, after it had already far outlasted its design lifetime, closing out a mission that had done more with a modest budget than most observers expected going in.
Gaganyaan Is India’s Crewed Spaceflight Program
Gaganyaan is ISRO’s program to launch Indian astronauts into orbit aboard an Indian rocket, using a version of the Launch Vehicle Mark-3 (LVM3) and a crew capsule developed specifically for the mission. ISRO has run a sequence of uncrewed test flights ahead of any crewed launch. One was an abort test, which verified that the crew escape system could pull the capsule clear of a failing rocket. As of 2026, those uncrewed tests have flown but a crewed Gaganyaan mission has not. ISRO has revised the timeline more than once already. Any specific target date for that first crewed flight comes from ISRO’s own public statements, and should be read as an announced goal rather than a confirmed schedule.
A successful crewed Gaganyaan flight would put India in a small group. Only the Soviet Union and Russia, the United States, and China have launched astronauts into orbit on rockets built in their own countries.
Bharatiya Antariksh Station Is India’s Planned Space Station
The Bharatiya Antariksh Station, often shortened to BAS, is ISRO’s planned space station, announced as a long-term goal that follows on from Gaganyaan’s crewed capability. ISRO has described target years for launching an initial module and for completing full assembly of the station, and those target years have appeared in ISRO’s own public briefings and statements. As of 2026, no BAS hardware has flown. The dates ISRO has floated remain its own stated targets rather than a committed launch schedule, in keeping with how ISRO has handled Gaganyaan’s own shifting timeline.
India’s Military Space Effort Sits Outside ISRO
India’s civil missions run through ISRO, while a separate body called the Defence Space Agency, under India’s Ministry of Defence, coordinates military use of space across the army, navy, and air force. The Defence Space Agency exists to manage satellite-dependent military functions like communications, navigation, and reconnaissance rather than to run science or exploration missions. It sits outside the scope of the Chandrayaan, Mangalyaan, and Gaganyaan programs covered here. Readers who want the fuller picture of India’s civil and military space effort side by side can read the India space program overview, and readers weighing India’s mission record against a larger, better-funded rival can read the China vs. India space program comparison, which also covers China’s own operating space station, Tiangong, against India’s still-planned BAS.