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Bengaluru (Karnataka): Former Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) Chairman K Sivan on Thursday said that the Chandrayaan-2 mission could not achieve success due to a ‘small error’ that occurred during the lunar mission in the year 2019.

Speaking to news agency ANI, K Sivan said,” This event should have occurred four years ago. Just because of a small error that occurred in Chandrayaan-2, we could not achieve success. Otherwise, we could have achieved all these things four years ago. Now, we are very happy that we learned from the error and corrected it.”

K Sivan further stated that Chandrayaan-3 was configured with corrections in 2019.

“In 2019 itself, we configured Chandrayaan-3, and what corrections are to be done were also decided in 2019 itself. Yesterday, we saw the fruit of that effort,” he said.

“Finally, our prayers came true. After landing we did not come back, I was still sitting in the control room till the rover came out of the lander. Only after seeing that the rover came out of the lander and moved over the surface of the moon, I came back to my home late at night,” he added. 

After a 40-day journey into space, the Chandrayaan-3 lander, `Vikram`, touched down on the uncharted lunar South Pole on Wednesday evening, making India the first country to do so. India also became only the fourth nation after the US, Russia and China to successfully conduct a lunar landing mission.

The Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft put down the Vikram lander on the lunar surface, tilting to a horizontal position ahead of landing.

The spacecraft was launched from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Andhra Pradesh’s Sriharikota on July 14.

A GSLV Mark 3 (LVM 3) heavy-lift launch vehicle was used for the launch of the spacecraft that was placed in the lunar orbit on August 5 and since then, it went through a series of orbital manoeuvres before zeroing in on the moon’s surface.