Chandrayaan-3 made a perfect soft landing on the moon’s surface at 6:04 PM on Wednesday, Only the United States, China, and Russia had achieved the task before, and now India become the fourth country who have achieved the mission successfully.

The tense final 20 minutes of Chandrayaan-3’s roughly 400,000 km voyage to the Moon were the ‘power descent’ phase, an automated landing routine carried out by the lander. A 2-meter-tall lander constitutes a component of Chandrayaan-3 and is intended to place a rover close to the lunar south pole of the Moon, where it will conduct a number of experiments for a period of two weeks.

The concept of “capturing the Moon” refers to the crucial moments when Chandrayaan-3 must choose a landing location. To do this, it is helped by a number of powerful cameras built in-house by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) as it prepares to decelerate from lunar orbit.

NASA’s LCROSS satellite crashed into a crater close to the Moon’s south pole in 2009, also showing water ice in the plume generated on impact. India is now the only country to have successfully landed a lunar mission on the Moon’s south pole.

A billion Indians continued to pray in unison, guarding the Vikram lander on its safe descent, as the minutes passed and the altitude counter on the live stream from the Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO) Mission Control near Bengaluru slowly and gradually descended.