Chandrayaan1- when India conquers the moon

MUMBAI: Chandrayaan1, India’s maiden moon mission will turn into a reality on Wednesday, October 22, 2008, when the 44-meter long Polar Satellite Launching Vehicle (PSLV), weighing 316 tonnes, blasts off from Satish Dhawan Space Centre at Shriharikotta in Andhra Pradesh.

There is no doubt that success of this lunar mission worth about Rs 400 crore will add another feather in India’s crown and the Indian Scientific Research Organization (ISRO) will get full credit for developing indigenous technologies in the field of aerospace and research.

What makes Chandrayaan1 so unique? “It’s a remote sensing mission, where 11 different instruments will be used for high resolution sensing of chemicals and mineralogical resources on moon surface via remote controls from the earth stations,” said Dr.N N Bhandari to CyberMedia News over phone from his residence in Ahmedabad.

Dr.Bhandari is a member of Science Advisory Board Mission Moon. He along with several top scientists and physicists are involved in drafting of key documents, project details and layout drawings before the mission moved into execution.   

According to Dr. Bhandari, basically there are three types of missions – technological, resource and scientific.

“Most of European missions are technological, where they experiment with various technologies for research. US missions are the resource based ones, while ours is a scientific mission where the scientists formulate some questions like moon’s evolution, life on moon and other planets, existence of water on moon, etc., and then they conducts experiments to seek answers to their questions,” he said.

Further, Dr. Bhandari said this mission would last for over two and a half years, before we can get any information about the questions asked by the scientists.

The process takes lots of time as first the collected data are sent to the scientists as per their experiments after which it is analyzed before it is available to public. In recent years, Japan and China have conducted such scientific missions.

Interestingly, Chandrayaan1 will be loaded with many experimental devices or payloads not just from India but other nation’s too. It will carry 11 payloads, where five belong to India, three to European Space Agency (ESA), two from National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and one from Bulgaria. 

Among the five Indian payloads, Terrain Mapping Camera (TMC) and Hyper Spectral Imager (HySI) are researched, designed and developed by Space Application Center (SAC) at Ahmedabad. SAC is among many centers set up by ISRO for scientific and technology research across India. 

“TMC and HySI are totally designed and built indigenously by SAC and High Energy X-ray Spectrometer (HEX) developed by Physical Research Laboratory (PRL). Similarly, Lunar Laser Ranging Instrument (LLRI) and Moon Impact Probe (MIP) are built by PRL, Bangalore,” informed Dr. Bhandari.

These five payloads are highly significant in terms of its uniqueness, development and technology as each of these payloads will be put to test with this mission.

It’s not just the efforts of scientists and engineers working at SAC Ahmedabad, but it’s a national effort with several scientific laboratories contributing and participating for the historic moon mission, stated Dr.Bhandari.  

From the technology and scientific point of view, Dr.Bhandari considered three major aspects linked with this mission and India’s technological capabilities that comprise robotics, miniaturization and data compression.

“For the first, we will be using remote controls for managing the devices sent to moon from earth station, which will test robotic technology. Secondly, while sending mission to moon, weight remains a critical factor and adds more cost to mission; hence we have miniaturized many large size devices and instruments,” he explained.

“Data compression, the last one is linked with data and its transfer time. A 20-minute data takes about 50 minutes to reach the earth and if we can reduce this period it would be a great achievement,” added Dr. Bhandari.   

He didn’t compare Chandrayaan1 with any other missions in past by other nations. For him, every mission is unique. This because the scientists mainly decide on the kind of experiments and technologies used for each mission, and hence it’s very difficult to compare a mission with another.

Dr. Bhandari stressed on the use of robotics technology rather than a manned mission to moon.

“We should master the technology of sending man to moon but we can use robots for planetary exploration. And we should not copy other country’s’ missions, instead should have our own Indian model for such mission,” he concluded.

Do you think India would be able to send man to the moon in near future? And what do you think of the use of such technological gains for the common man?