This is Science Friday. I'm Flora Lichtman, sitting in for Iroflado.

Later in the hour, a trip to Alaska to see how goldmining has changed the landscape.

And everything you need to know about sea otters.

But first, on Wednesday, the Indian Space Agency isero,

celebrated as its Chundrayan-3 craft successfully made a soft landing at the Lunar South Pole.

People are applauding, let us all wait to hear from the Secretary Department of Space and Chairman Istro Shri S. Somnath.

Sir, we have achieved soft landing on the moon. India is on the moon.

The control room cheers. Always give me chills. Joining me now to talk about that and other

stories from the week in Science is Maggie Curth. Science journalist and editorial lead for

Carbon Plan. Welcome back to Science Friday.

Hi, thanks for having me. So this seems like a big deal for India Space Program.

Yeah, so they are the first country now to put an unmanned lander on the moon's South Pole.

And this is particularly important because it's coming right after Russia failed to do the same

thing earlier in the week. That Russian lander that crashed on the moon last weekend was trying to

hit the same area. Aside from being a point of pride, what is the purpose of the mission?

Well, so this is kind of interesting. It's part of a growing space race that is really about

who has access to water resources on the moon. Like you can kind of imagine this as outer space

Chinatown. This is India, it is Russia, it is China, the US is interested, and this is all because

back in 2009 people found water on the moon's surface and ice under the surface and the South

Pole appears to have the highest concentrations of that. It's important for scientific reasons.

You know, we're talking about water that is ancient and it could teach us a lot about the

solar system and even how oceans on earth got started. But what everybody is really getting excited

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