In late 2025 observatories tagged a mystery near-Earth object as CE1M9G2 and assumed it was an asteroid. It turned out to be a piece of Chandrayaan-3, the ISRO mission that had flown its propulsion module from lunar orbit back to Earth. This episode starts with the 2019 Chandrayaan-2 crash, caused by a fixed-thrust central engine that could not correct the lander’s attitude during the camera coasting phase, and explains the fixes: four variable-thrust corner engines, attitude correction rates raised from 10 to 25 degrees per second, a laser Doppler velocimeter for a real-time 3D picture of the ground, and reinforced landing legs.

The hosts then walk through the August 23, 2023 landing near the lunar south pole, the Pragyan rover’s 14-day window before the minus 184 degree Celsius lunar night, and the decision to skip radioisotope heaters to protect the mass budget. They cover the September 3 hop that lifted Vikram 40 centimeters and made it only the second lander to relaunch on the Moon after Surveyor 6, the ChaSTE probe’s finding of 70 degrees Celsius at the surface and minus 10 just 10 centimeters down, LIBS detection of sulfur, aluminum, iron and titanium, and the chemical match to the Antarctic meteorite ALHA 81005. The episode closes with the SHAPE payload studying Earth as a habitability template, the roughly 615 crore rupee budget, and the awards and eight million concurrent livestream viewers the mission drew.

• Why Chandrayaan-2 failed and the hardware and software changes that fixed it
• Water ice, permanently shadowed craters and the rocket equation case for the lunar south pole
• The lander hop and what it proves for future sample return and crewed missions
• Regolith as a near-perfect vacuum insulator and its implications for buried habitats
• Perigee burns, a smaller LVM3 rocket, and how the mission cost about 75 million US dollars