The south pole of the moon could be a bit crowded this summer. Yesterday India sent back pictures from its mission to put a lander near a polar crater, at the same time that Russia announced it was on track to launch a craft to the same region this week.
If India is successful, it would mark the first “soft landings” near the moon’s south pole and the country would become the fourth, after the Soviet Union, China and the US, to put a rover on the moon.
The Indian space agency’s images of the moon were taken by its Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft, which is now in orbit after a series of increasingly elongated loops around the Earth. The country hopes to put a rover
