The Hindu Business Line : ISRO, NASA ink pact for two US payloads aboard Chandrayaan-1

MOVING AHEAD: Mr G. Madhavan Nair, Chairman, ISRO, and Dr Michael Griffin, Administrator, NASA, addressing the press in Bangalore on Tuesday after signing the MoU on the inclusion of two US scientific instruments on board India's first Mission to Moon, Chandrayaan-1. -- Bhagya Prakash K

Bangalore , May 9

Indian Space Research Organisation and its US counterpart NASA on Tuesday signed a MoU for placing two US scientific instruments on board ISRO's lunar craft.

The Chandrayaan-1 two-year orbiting mission is slated for early 2008.

The ISRO Chairman, Mr G. Madhavan Nair, and the NASA Administrator, Dr Michael Griffin, signed the MoU. At a news conference, Mr Nair said the onboard arrangement for the lunar craft has now been completed; ISRO has formalised three European and one Bulgarian no-cost payloads alongside its five main instruments.

The US instruments include a Mini SAR (synthetic aperture radar) to detect water in the permanently shadowed lunar poles. M3 or moon mineralogy mapper will scan from a never-before close range.

Future tie-ups

ISRO's Physical Research Lab Director, Dr J.N. Goswami said the past US missions had conducted these studies fleetingly, as part of larger defence or fly-past missions like the 1994-97 Clementine probe that had spotted polar snow.

The mission's length, close flight to lunar surface and sophisticated sensors were of advantage now.

Other visits

The two chiefs said ISRO and NASA had potential to work jointly on non-duplicating, cost-saving and data-sharing projects, which was under consideration by a joint working group.

Interestingly, over the next two days, Dr Griffin, the first NASA chief visiting in 30 years, will visit two of the three remaining US-blacklisted "entities" — ISRO's rocket making facility of the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre at Thiruvananthapuram and the launchpad, the Satish Dhawan Space Centre at Sriharikota.

Chandrayaan-1 would orbit the lunar surface pole to pole for two years.

It aims to conduct the first comprehensive mineral scanning and record high-resolution, 3D maps of the entire lunar surface.

Spacecraft design

The mission promised to generate rich and unexplored scientific data, said the ISRO spokesman, Mr S. Krishnamurthy.

A National Scientific Data Centre is being planned in Bangalore to analyse all lunar inputs. Meanwhile the spacecraft design has been finalised.

The extra-thrust 12-tonne PSLV rocket motor — as against the standard 9-tonne motor — has been tested.

The Indian payloads are a terrain mapping camera; a hyperspectral imager; a high-energy X-ray spectrometer to search for rare minerals; a lunar laser ranging instrument; and a moon impact probe.

ISRO has chosen the foreign payloads from among 16 international proposals.