One spacecraft will be Indian Space Research Organisation's own Chandrayaan-2, while the other will be from India's first private moonshot Team Indus which is competing in the Google LunarXPrize challenge.
Thirty-six years to the day since Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin became the first humans to walk on the moon, Google Inc. extended its mapping service to cover the lunar surface.
Contributors to Team Indus project will have names etched on an object going to space.
Beresheet was developed by SpaceIL and Israel Aerospace Industries. If the mission had been completed successfully, Israel would have been the fourth country, after the Soviet Union, the United States and China, to land a spacecraft on the moon.
Mainstream American newspapers, many of which had been sceptical of India's space mission and sometimes even made fun of it through cartoons, noted the great Indian achievement.
The rover will carry out in-situ chemical analysis of the lunar surface during the course of its mobility.
Google released the new Nexus 9 amid high expectations, and by the looks of it, the tablet looks like a worthy upgrade to last year's Nexus 7, says Himanshu Juneja.
While New Jersey, US-based OrbitBeyond leads a consortium of subcontractors who have designed and developed hardware for deep space missions, Bengaluru-based Team Indus is leading OrbitBeyond's lander engineering, reports T E Narasimhan.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin and X Prize founder Peter Diamandis said their aim is to spark a second space race to animate scientific imagination and inspire engineers and entrepreneurs to develop low-cost methods of robotic space exploration.
The success of the PSLV-C34 mission is a result of ISRO's professionalism and the hard work put in by their scientists over the last many decades., says Ajay Lele.
Some time before December 31, 2017, Bengaluru based Team Indus aims to land a vehicle on the moon.
The X Prize Foundation and Google Inc have announced a robotic race to the moon. The rules of the game are that participants must land a rover on the lunar surface, run it for at least 500 metres and send video images and data back to earth.
While Team Indus had backing from Nandan Nilekani, Ratan Tata and Flipkart founders Sachin and Binny Bansal, it could not even muster half of the Rs 4.5 billion it required for the mission to the moon.
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