"Smile, Please!": Rover Pragyan Clicks Image Of Lander Vikram On Moon

Chandrayaan-3 rover Pragyan shared an image of the lander Vikram on Wednesday, the first that it has clicked using its Navigation camera. The picture is the first that the rover has clicked since landing on the moon. Until now, all the photos and videos had been captured by Vikram.

Sharing the photograph on Twitter, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) called it the "image of the mission".

The NavCams, onboard the rover, have been developed by the Laboratory for Electro-Optics Systems (LEOS) in Bengaluru.

Chandrayaan-3 has captivated public attention since launching nearly six weeks ago in front of thousands of cheering spectators, and its successful touchdown on the Moon last week came just days after a Russian lander crashed in the same region.

India became only the fourth country to achieve that feat, and the first to land on the uncharted south pole of Earth's nearest celestial neighbour.

The new photo comes just a day after the rover discovered sulphur near the Moon's South Pole. The robot also detected aluminium, calcium, iron, chromium, titanium, manganese, silicon and oxygen, ISRO announced yesterday.

"The Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) instrument onboard Chandrayaan-3 Rover has made the first-ever in-situ measurements on the elemental composition of the lunar surface near the south pole. These in-situ measurements confirm the presence of Sulphur (S) in the region unambiguously, something that was not feasible by the instruments onboard the orbiters," the space agency said in a statement.