India became the fifth nation to land on the Moon last night, after Chandrayaan-1 successfully made the 240,000-mile voyage to the lunar surface.

The probe embedded itself in the Moon’s crust at 3.04pm GMT. Fired from an orbiting unmanned spacecraft 25 minutes earlier, it travelled to the Moon’s surface at 1km a second, a spokesman for the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) said.

Launched from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre, close to the city of Madras in southern India, on October 22, the module, which was painted with the colours of the Indian tricolour, is part of a two-year mission to survey the lunar crust in a search for water, minerals and helium3, an energy source rare on Earth.

The chairman of ISRO, Madhavan Nair, said: “We have now successfully put our national flag on the lunar surface.”

The probe’s impact with the Moon, which left a crater at the lunar south pole, was met with a cheer from the scientists monitoring the mission.

Mr Nair added: “The Moon has been very favourable to us and this is a very productive and fruitful mission . . . We have also emerged as a low-cost travel agency to space,” a reference to the $80 million (£55 million) budget of the project.

India follows the United States, Russia, Japan and China in reaching the Moon. The moment marks the highest achievement to date for the country’s 45-year-old space programme, the early days of which were immortalised by an Henri Cartier-Bresson photograph that captured the nose cone of an Indian rocket being wheeled to its launch site on a bicycle.

India founded its space programme to develop satellites and to launch vehicles to reduce dependence on overseas agencies. Critics have argued that the money would be better spent on helping those mired in chronic poverty on the ground.

Shrugging off those concerns, an emboldened Indian space agency is now talking about a manned mission to the Moon by 2020, an ambition that will place it alongside China and Japan in an Asian space race.

Advocates for India’s lunar exploits argue that the ISRO has become a commercially viable organisation, by delivering satellites into space for a fee – work in which it has undercut many of its rivals.

India’s flagship technology industry has also benefited from the expertise of the agency, they add.

All being well, the 1.38tonne spacecraft from which the lunar module was deployed will orbit for almost two years, using high-resolution remote sensing to compile a three-dimensional atlas of the Moon and analyse the composition of its surface.

In all, Chandrayaan-1 will carry 11 payloads; five pieces of equipment from ISRO and six from foreign agencies, including Nasa and the European Space Agency. ISRO technicians will track the mission from the Deep Space Network station in the village of Byalalu, about 25 miles (40km) from the southern city of Bangalore.

The Indian agency’s next step is to launch a second unmanned lunar mission – Chandrayaan-2 – in 2011, comprising an orbiting spacecraft, a lander and a Moon rover.

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