Years of hard work paid off: Isro chief credits success to his team

The lessons that we learnt from our failure helped us perfect this mission, Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) chief S Somanath said on Wednesday as he credited the success of Chandrayaan-3 mission to the hard work of all the scientists who worked on it for over a decade.

"Many, many years of hard work has paid off today. Chandrayaan-3's work started four years back, but our scientists have been working on Chandrayaan-2 and before that on Chandrayaan-1 for years. We failed last time, but the lessons that we learnt from our failure, helped us perfect this mission," Somanath said while addressing the media at the Isro Telemetry Tracking and Command Network (ISTRAC) in Bengaluru, after the spacecraft's successful soft-landing.

Chandrayaan-3 is a follow-up mission of Chandrayaan-2, India's second lunar mission which was launched in 2019 but failed to make a soft landing on the Moon.

Acknowledging the contribution of a generation of leadership by the scientists of the country's space agency for the mission's success, he said this is an "incremental progress" and "definitely a huge one".