The Gaganyaan mission is aimed at developing a human-habitable space capsule that will carry a three-member crew into an orbit of 400km for three days.

It consumed material equal to about three times Earth's mass each time it made a close pass on its elongated oval-shaped obit.

The launch comes two weeks after India became the fourth nation to successfully land a spacecraft on the moon with its Chandrayaan-3 mission to the unexplored lunar south pole.

The mission is meant to demonstrate Japan's ability to put a lightweight, low-cost craft on the moon within 100m of a designated landing site using an advanced visual navigation system.

Scientists are interested in pockets of ancient ice because they could provide a record of lunar volcanoes, material that comets and asteroids delivered to Earth, and the origin of oceans.

Scientists and officials clapped, cheered and hugged each other as the spacecraft landed and people across India broke out in celebration, setting off firecrackers and dancing in the streets.

India's mission - Chandrayaan means 'moon vehicle' in Hindi and Sanskrit - is its second attempt to land there.

The seemingly sudden competition to get to a previously unexplored region of the moon recalls the space race of the 1960s, when the US and the Soviet Union competed.

Russia's Luna-25 space craft spun out of control and crashed into the moon after a problem preparing for pre-landing orbit, underscoring the post-Soviet decline of a once mighty space programme.

Russia's state space corporation, Roskosmos, says it lost contact with the craft after a problem as the craft was shunted into pre-landing orbit.

The Chandrayaan-3 mission is designed to deploy a lander and rover near the moon's south pole around Aug 23.

India would join a group of three other countries that have managed a controlled lunar landing, including the US, the former Soviet Union and China, if the mission succeeds.