India began exploring the Moon's surface with a rover on Thursday, a day after it became the first nation to land a craft near the largely unexplored lunar south pole, reports AFP.
Pragyan -- "Wisdom" in Sanskrit -- rolled out of the lander hours after the latest milestone in India's ambitious but cut-price space programme.
"Rover ramped down the lander and India took a walk on the moon!" the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, on Thursday.
The six-wheeled, solar-powered rover will amble around the relatively unmapped region and transmit images and scientific data over its two-week lifespan.
The successful touchdown of the Chandrayaan-3 ("Mooncraft-3") mission came just days after a Russian lander crashed in the same region.
It also comes four years after the previous Indian lunar mission failed during final descent, in what was seen at the time as a huge setback for its space programme.
Elon Musk, whose firm SpaceX is a leader in commercial space launches, hailed the landing as "super cool".
The Indian mission took much longer to reach the Moon than the Apollo missions in the 1960s and 1970s, which arrived in a matter of days.
Chandrayaan-3 was launched on a less-powerful rocket and had to orbit the Earth several times to gain speed before embarking on its month-long journey.
India has a comparatively low-budget space programme, but one that has grown considerably in size and momentum since it first sent a probe to orbit the Moon in 2008.
Chandrayaan-3 has a cost of $74.6 million -- far lower than many missions from other countries and a testament to India's frugal space engineering.
Bd-pratidin English/Golam Rosul
