An Indian spacecraft landed on the rugged, unexplored south pole of the moon on Wednesday in a mission seen as crucial to lunar exploration and India’s standing as a space power, just days after a similar Russian lander crashed.

It was the second time India tried to land on the moon. In 2020, the Chandrayaan-2 crashed hard due to a software error, India then decided to go ahead with the Chandrayaan-3 mission.

A few days ago, another Russian attempt to land at the South Pole failed. The Luna-25 smashed into the moon. The crash of the Russian lunar craft was due to a fault with the engine. It should have burned for 84 seconds for the craft to orbit the moon, but burned for 127 seconds, the state space company Roskosmos reported. Earlier lunar missions by Japan and Israel, among others, failed.