3, 2, 1, 0… Mission Moon gets ready for take off
Pulkit Vasudha
Ahmedabad, August 31: The countdown to India’s first moon mission has begun, and the major part of the work is happening in our own backyard at the Physical Research Laboratory (PRL) and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) in Ahmedabad. When Chandrayan-I soars into space in April 2008, India will become the fifth country — after Russia, USA, Japan and China — to undertake space exploration.
The payloads have already started arriving at Space Applications Centre (SAC) and PRL for testing in the vacuum and vibration chambers. A team of scientists led by Professor Narendra Bhandari at PRL and SAC are giving the final touches to the remote sensing lunar craft.
“For ISRO, the moon is the next stepping stone, the next station for undertaking planetary studies,” says Professor Narendra Bhandari, a lunar scientist and the man behind the mission.
Chandrayan-I will orbit around the moon at a distance of 100 kilometres, barely the distance between Ahmedabad and Baroda. The mission’s objective is to create a high-resolution map of the moon and primarily probe for the presence of water at its polar ends. It will also gather data on the minerals and chemicals present on the moon’s surface as well as under its crust.
“The launch of Chandrayan-I is expected in April next year. After nearly seven years, the mission has now reached its final stages,” says Professor Narendra Bhandari.
For this mission, Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC) at Trivandrum is working on the rocket. ISRO Satellite Centre and ISRO Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network in Bangalore are working on the lunar craft and tracking and telemetry. The three high-resolution digital cameras are being made at SAC, Ahmedabad.
The satellite will travel a distance of 3,86,000 kilometres in five-and-a-half days to reach the moon. The satellite has been designed on a shoestring budget of Rs 100 crore, which is less than the cost of passenger aircraft nowadays. Chandrayan-I will orbit the moon for two years, the longest period of orbit of any lunar craft to date. During this time, it will beam photographs of the polar regions, the visible side and the far side of the moon, which will create a valuable repository of information about the earth’s satellite.
The lunar and space scientists all across the world are awaiting the launch of India’s first scientific mission to the moon. The indigenous technologies developed by Indian scientists are much in demand. During the international conference on ‘Exploration and utilization of the moon’in 2004, India proposed that countries such as Japan, China and USA, which are also launching lunar missions around the same time, should collaborate with the Indian moon mission.
In fact, several of the payloads used in the lunar craft are being designed in collaboration with international scientists. “Our design of the lunar craft left space for an additional 10 kg worth of payloads,” says Bhandari. “We invited proposals from all over the world and zeroed in on a few interesting project designs submitted by scientists of Bulgaria, Sweden, USA, Germany and Japan.”
Source: Indian Express