Tata Comm expertise for Team Indus

The seeds of an enduring association tend to sprout in the most unlikeliest of places. Ask Team Indus, India’s only competitor in the $30 million Google Lunar Xprize, in pursuit of becoming one of the first privately funded team to safely land a spacecraft on the surface of the moon.

Lasting alliance Or ask Peter Diamandis, Chairman and CEO, Xprize Foundation, whose long standing friendship with Ratan Tata, Chairman Emeritus, Tata Sons, laid the foundation for a lasting alliance, one that included building architectural designs that would make spacewalk a certainty.

Sounds futuristic? Not really, when the aim is to usher in a new era of lunar travel. “It is our passion for space, our obsession with aviation that brought us together,” said Diamandis, speaking about Ratan Tata’s association with the Foundation. Tata is among the board of trustees at Xprize Foundation, a non-profit that runs technology competitions.

“About five years ago, Ratan Tata joined our board, and has been a very close friend,” Diamandis told BusinessLine . “It was uncanny how my dream of going to space, and how NASA need not be the only way to go there, was reflected in his (Tata’s) vision,” he said.

For Team Indus, that is building a spacecraft that goes to the moon, and is on a mission to lead India into the next generation of space exploration and aviation technology, the same passion has now borne fruit. Tata Communications is to provide Team Indus’ journey with mission critical communication services. The Google Lunar Xprize competition is aimed at developing low cost methods of robotic space exploration. Ten teams are in the fray to safely land a spacecraft on the surface of the moon that travels at least 500 meters, and transmits high definition video, images and data back to Earth.

Robust network In any space mission, maintaining communications with the spacecraft at all times is of paramount importance. To transmit a signal over 380,000 km from the Earth to the Moon and then back again, relies heavily on an extremely robust network.

Since the initiative is set to redefine space exploration, Tata Communications decided to be an intrinsic part of the journey that Team Indus has embarked on. Team Indus is to use Tata Communications’ low latency network to connect data centres in India with a Deep Space Network in the US, to ensure visibility of the spacecraft at all times both during flight and for lunar surface operations.

As Rahul Narayan, Team Leader, Team Indus, pointed out, Tata Communications’ long range communication expertise and low latency connectivity between ground tracking stations is not only mission critical, but a huge contributor in the future of space exploration.

Terming it pioneering, Julie Woods-Moss, CEO of Tata Communications’ Nextgen Business said, to be part of Team Indus’ mission to the moon and help send back data, video and images, would ultimately transform the understanding of the lunar landscape.

Lunar landscape All data collected from the lunar rover via the tracking stations would be routed to Tata Communications’ Bangalore Data Centre, which hosts the compute and analytics resources of Team Indus.

The command centre of Team Indus would then use this data to send commands back to the lunar craft via dedicated connectivity to the tracking stations.

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