The Hindu Business Line : ISRO eyes late Oct for Moon mission

Bangalore, Sept. 18 Some time in late October or early November, the Tricolour should ‘spring’ up on the Moon’s surface four lakh km away. Only four other countries have been there before.

The Indian Space Research Organisation is looking at an October-end launch though it does not have a definite date for Chandrayaan-1, its most ambitious mission so far.

Mr M. Annadurai, Chandrayaan Project Director at ISRO Satellite Centre here, told a news conference on Thursday that the spacecraft was “99 per cent ready” and scientists were conducting two last crucial tests on the spacecraft — with vibration and acoustics — in the next couple of days before shipping it to the Sriharikota launch pad. ISRO’s workhorse vehicle, the PSLV, will launch it and take it to the Moon over 8-10 days.

The Rs 386-crore Chandrayaan-1 is a two-year mission that will orbit the Moon pole-to-pole 100 km from its surface. It now includes a test instrument, the Moon Impact Probe. MIP will crash land on the surface and send out data for 25 minutes of its life. It will also plant the national flag to mark India’s entry on the Moon.

There were 69 lunar missions between 1958 and 1976, with the US, Russia, China and Japan now returning to the Moon with greater interest. Yet, Chandrayaan-1, according to Dr T.K.Alex, Director of ISAC, will take the first look at the unseen face of the Moon that is always turned away from Earth. It will do the first comprehensive lunar surface mapping in the entire electromagnetic spectrum to find any special materials of economic use back home, such as uranium, thorium, titanium, magnesium and calcium, for possible prospecting in future. ISRO is an old master at mapping the Earth’s surface deep and wide through its IRS brand of remote sensing satellites.

Another interest is to locate lunar helium 3 to possibly harvest for energy from the elusive nuclear fusion. Also, is there water on Moon, which is thought to have frozen polar ice? It may also yield some clues to the Moon’s origin. “Our mission will try to answer only some of these questions,” he said.

The large lunar craters would have some stories to tell, said Dr P.Sreekumar, Head of Space Astronomy and Instrumentation at ISAC.

The second lunar mission, Chandrayaan-2, which was cleared by the Union Cabinet on Thursday, will follow in 2011-12.

Mr Annadurai said ISRO was negotiating the work sharing details with its partner, Russia. "We now need two years (half the time taken for Chandrayaan-1) to get it ready," he said. The technical proposals are yet to be called.

The nearly 600-kg spacecraft built at ISAC carries as much fuel, 11 instruments, including six international payloads coming from NASA, Sweden, European Space Agency, Japan's JAXA and Bulgaria. Coordinating the standards and fitting these instruments in the bus was the biggest challenge, said Mr Annadurai, who has been at the helm of the project since February 2004.

Conceived in 1999 and begun in March 2004, Chandrayaan-1, they said, would arguably be the fastest, cheapest lunar mission with some top instruments. Systems such as the `bus' or spacecraft body may cost four times in the West. The Topography Monitoring Camera has a fine resolution of 5 metres. The hyperspectral camera will give a colourful output in 3D - another first. The brain on ground, the Deep Space Network with a 32-m antenna, can get worldwide data reception through its network of ground stations.

HAL built the structure, while BHEL, L&T, Tata Advanced Materials Ltd, Godrej and a host of industries chipped in with various sub-systems.

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