Chandrayaan-3 rover confirms presence of these elements on Moon's South Pole

Space scientist TV Venkateswaran the rover will now go to different places and look for the elemental composition and concentration of it in different parts.

"Orbiters (of) Chandrayaan 1, Chandrayaan 2 and American orbiters have (already) done remote sensing and mapped the minerals on the surface of the moon. But it's a remote sensing taken from roughly about 100 km away...You need to land on the moon at least in few places, look for this data and see whether this data matches with the remote sensing data. If they match, then our confidence on the remote sensing data will be very high...," Venkateswaran told news agency ANI.

LIBS is a scientific technique that analyses the composition of materials by exposing them to intense laser pulses, ISRO said.

"A high-energy laser pulse is focused onto the surface of a material, such as a rock or soil. The laser pulse generates an extremely hot and localised plasma. The collected plasma light is spectrally resolved and detected by detectors such as Charge Coupled Devices. Since each element emits a characteristic set of wavelengths of light when it's in a plasma state, the elemental composition of the material is determined," it said.

LIBS instrument was developed at the Laboratory for Electro-Optics Systems at Peenya Industrial Estate, Bengaluru where the first Indian satellite was fabricated in 1975.

India scripted history on August 23 as ISRO's third Moon mission Chandrayaan-3's Lander Module (LM) touched down on the lunar surface, making it only the fourth country to accomplish the feat and the first to reach the uncharted south pole of Earth's only natural satellite.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Saturday announced the decision to name the spot where the Chandrayaan-3 Vikram lander made a soft landing as 'Shiv Shakti Point’ and the site where the Chandrayaan-2 lander crash-landed on the Moon's surface in 2019 would be known as "Tiranga Point".

Also, August 23, the day the Chandrayaan-3 lander touched down on the lunar surface, would be celebrated as ‘National Space Day’, Modi had said.