This is truly a historic achievement for India and the world:

India’s
first unmanned lunar probe has landed successfully on the moon, a
milestone for the country’s 45-year-old space programme.

The moon-landing on Friday is part of a two-year mission that lays
the groundwork for further Indian space expeditions, the Indian Space
Research Organisation (ISRO) said.

G
Madhavan Nair, the ISRO chairman, said that cameras on board had
transmited images of the moon back to Indian space control, the Press
Trust of India news agency reported.

The moon mission was launched from the Sriharikota space centre in southern India on October 22.

Scientific study

The box-shaped lunar probe carried a video imaging system, a radar altimeter and a mass spectrometer.

The video imaging system was intended to take the pictures of the
moon’s surface, the radar altimeter was to measure the rate of descent
of the probe to the lunar surface and the mass spectrometer was for
studying the extremely thin lunar atmosphere.

The Moon Impact Probe was one of the 11 payloads of the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, a space agency statement said.

To date only the US, Russia, the European Space Agency, Japan and China and now India have sent missions to the moon.

I think that somewhere, Kalpana Chawla is smiling.