India began exploring the moon's surface with a rover on Thursday, a day after it became the first nation to land a craft near the largely unexplored lunar south pole.

Pragyan—"Wisdom" in Sanskrit—rolled out of the lander hours after the latest milestone in India's ambitious but cut-price space program sparked huge celebrations across the country.

"Rover ramped down the lander and India took a walk on the moon!" the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, on Thursday.

The six-wheeled, solar-powered rover will amble around the relatively unmapped region and transmit images and scientific data over its two-week lifespan.

NASA's Parker Solar Probe zoomed past Venus on Aug. 21, using the planet's gravity to aim toward a record-setting series of flights around the sun that start next month.

At just before 8:03 a.m.

A team of computational social scientists at George Mason University has found via simulations that 22 people is the minimum number needed to start a human colony on Mars. The group has posted a paper describing their simulation on the arXiv preprint server.

As humans around the globe ponder the possibility of one day sending people to Mars, and then at some later date, establishing a colony, scientists are exploring ways to overcome the hurdles standing in the way of achieving such goals. One factor that needs to be addressed, according to the team, is determining how many people could sustain a Mars colony, and what types of people are required.

To find possible answers, the team created a model simulating a Mars colony, focused specifically on how many people are required to create a viable colony as well as the characteristics that would most likely contribute to the success of such a colony. To that end, they used data from past endeavors, such as questionnaires filled out by groups aboard the International Space Station or those living in close quarters in the Arctic for months at a time.