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Bangalore , June 27

ISRO's lunar mission coming up in 2007-08 will carry three scientific payloads from premier European institutes. ISRO and the European Space Agency signed an agreement for this today.

The agreement allows Indian and ESA scientists to share data from these instruments.

Three experimental payloads from British, German, and Swedish research institutes will fly aboard the spacecraft.

Europe will also contribute to the Indian high-energy X-ray spectrometer while ESA instruments will complement ISRO experiments, an ISRO release said.

The ESA Director-General, Dr Jean-Jacques Dordain, and the ISRO chief, Mr Madhavan Nair, signed the agreement.

Mr Nair said that ISRO was awaiting US clearance for NASA's ice detecting payload to fly on the mission.

The unmanned orbiting Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, weighing 525 kg, will be launched by the domestic PSLV launcher.

The European payloads include a low-energy X-ray spectrometer from the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, UK; a near-infra-red spectrometer from Max Planck Institute of Aeronomie, Germany, to detect lunar minerals; and a reflecting analyser from the Swedish Institute of Space Physics, developed in collaboration with India.

Indian instruments include a terrain mapping camera, a hyper spectral imager, a lunar laser ranging instrument and an impact probe.

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