India lands on the moon

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.