Our daily spaceflight around the world

🇮🇳 India became the fourth country to successfully land on the Moon. The country’s Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft touched down yesterday morning, setting off a wave of celebrations across India. Chandrayaan-3 is the first craft in history to make a soft landing at the Moon’s south pole, where it will deploy a robotic rover to run experiments over the next two weeks. Many countries and private companies – including the US, China, and Russia – are interested in Moon’s south pole, since peer-reviewed research has found it contains a large amount of frozen water (a potential source for rocket fuel and/or use in daily life).

🇷🇺 Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the Wagner mercenary group that mutinied against Russia, likely died in a plane crash. Russian authorities said Prigozhin was onboard a private plane that crashed northwest of Moscow yesterday afternoon, with all 10 passengers and crew presumed dead. A Telegram account associated with the Wagner Group claimed the plane, which belonged to Prigozhin, was shot down by Russian air defenses. Unverified video footage posted by onlookers shows what looks like the trail of a missile and the plane falling from the sky with one wing missing, per the WSJ. In June, Prigozhin led a failed mutiny against Russia that saw ~25,000 Wagner troops advance to within 120 miles of Moscow.

🇧🇷🇷🇺🇮🇳🇨🇳🇿🇦 Leaders of the BRICS nations gathered for a summit in Johannesburg. BRICS refers to a grouping of the economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. For years, the leaders of BRICS nations have spoken about their desire to move the international trade and debt system away from its current reliance on the US dollar, and towards a new, non-Western currency. At this week’s summit, officials announced plans to establish mechanisms to add some of the 40+ countries which have expressed interest.