India Moon probe ready for launch
By Paul Rincon
Science reporter, BBC News


India is counting down to the launch of its first mission to the Moon.

On Wednesday, the unmanned Chandrayaan 1 spacecraft will blast off from a launch pad in Andhra Pradesh to embark on a two-year mission of exploration.

The robotic probe will orbit the Moon, compiling a 3-D atlas of the lunar surface and mapping the distribution of elements and minerals. The launch is regarded as a major step for India as it seeks to keep pace with other space-faring nations in Asia.

An Indian-built launcher carrying the one-and-a-half-tonne satellite is due to blast off from Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota at about 0650 local time (0050 GMT) on Wednesday.

Competitive mission

"Everything is going perfectly as planned," the centre's associate director MYS Prasad told the AFP news agency, after the official countdown began in the early hours of Monday.

One key objective will be to search for surface or sub-surface water-ice on the Moon, especially at the poles. Another will be to detect Helium 3, an isotope which is rare on Earth, but is sought to power nuclear fusion and could be a valuable source of energy in future.

Powered by a single solar panel generating about 700 Watts, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) probe carries five Indian-built instruments and six that are foreign-built. The mission is expected to cost 3.8bn rupees (£45m; $78m).

The Indian experiments include a 30kg probe that will be released from the mothership to slam into the lunar surface. The Moon Impact Probe (MIP) will record video footage on the way down and measure the composition of the Moon's tenuous atmosphere.

"Chandrayaan has a very competitive set of instruments... it will certainly do good science," said Barry Kellett, project scientist on the C1XS instrument, which was built at the Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory in the UK.

C1XS will map the abundance of different elements in the lunar crust to help answer key questions about the origin and evolution of Earth's only natural satellite.

Researchers say the relative abundances of magnesium and iron in lunar rocks could help confirm whether the Moon was once covered by a molten, magma ocean.

"The iron should have sunk [in the magma ocean], whereas the magnesium should have floated," Mr Kellett told BBC News. "The ratio of magnesium to iron for the whole Moon tells you to what extent the Moon melted and what it did after it formed."

The instrument will look for more unusual elements on the Moon's surface, such as titanium. This metallic element has been found in lunar meteorites, but scientists know little about its distribution in the lunar crust.

Chandrayaan will also investigate the differences between the Moon's near side and its far side. The far side is both more heavily cratered and different in composition to the one facing Earth.

On Wednesday, the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) rocket will loft Chandrayaan into an elliptical "transfer orbit" around Earth. The probe will later carry out a series of engine burns to set it on a lunar trajectory.

The spacecraft coasts for about five-and-a-half days before firing the engine to slow its velocity such that it is captured by the Moon's gravity. Chandrayaan will slip into a near-circular orbit at an altitude of 1,000km. After a number of health checks, the probe will drop its altitude until it is orbiting just 100km above the lunar surface.

India, China, Japan and South Korea all have eyes on a share of the commercial satellite launch business and see their space programmes as an important symbol of international stature and economic development.

Last month, China became only the third country in the world to independently carry out a spacewalk.

But the Indian government's space efforts have not been welcomed by all. Some critics regard the space programme as a waste of resources in a country where millions still lack basic services.

And always will... I say good luck to them. The bennefits of the "high frontier" will accrue exponentially to the nation or nations, that have the resolve to explore and eventually colonise it. Those who turn their backs on it, for whatever reason, deserve the ignominy that will result.

- Peter.

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Space belongs to the Chinese and now the Indians. We and the Europeans will never go back in any real way. Space is not going to be about exploration but exploitation and we don't have the stomach for mining the moon or Mars. Look what the Indians are doing with this probe. They are the first ones to look for minerals that can be expolited and brought back as raw materials. We go up there for purposes of knowing how the universe was formed and they go up there with miner's hats on. Who is going to win THIS race?

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I wonder who they will use for technical support.

Outsourced to NASA retirees in Boca,or the "Mirolax Belt" as it's known.

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i remember reading about india's first a-test in the early 70's (late 60's?) in "my weekly reader". even as a third? grader i didn't understand why they needed bombs when they couldn't take care of their own. (now i wonder - population reduction?)

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You are right..........

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1081023/jsp/foreign/story_10008354.jsp

Chandrayaan keeps Nasa hopes alive

Washington, Oct. 22: A press release by the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) about the launch of Chandrayaan-1 said it all. “Nasa Returns to the Moon with Instruments on Indian Spacecraft," it said.

America caught the world’s imagination when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, but nearly 40 years later it has a space programme that is in crisis. The US is looking to India, in part, for help in tiding over that crisis and to keep its space programme going.

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Why would they go for exploration? We have already done that bit. Why would they reinvent the wheel? Minerals is something we didn't look for at the time. They can see our exploration data and go try mining it.

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What a waste of money! If they want to "explore"... Why don't they try exploring their own poor, starving, and disease infested, suffering people.

This kind of short-sightedness makes me sick.

Half of the people live in substandard housing, and are sick and starving.

Why?

Only if you consider their people important. The govt obviously doesn't.

WGAS? Why get aggravated over what somebody else does to their own people.

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The starving people will never end till they realize getting married at 16 and having babies by the ton every year is a selfish act that burdens the nation as well as bogs it down for progress. Don't think progress will stop in the name of such selfish fools. Every 5 second a baby is born in India, till date 60 million Bangladeshi refugees, mostly Muslim economic refugees have been absorbed in India, day in day out, people from Nepal and Bangladesh come and settle. Guess the starving mass will never stop, does that mean all science should be put in back burner and India should demilitarize and get into eternal servitude at the cost of its sovereignty. How bout China, they have plenty of poverty, doesn't stop them from making ambitious projects. How about the Olympics? In the same way, US has homeless and poor, not to the level of India or China as it has far less population and have had a much better history but even then, should US halt all the NASA as well as Jet Propulsion lab and other projects?

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Nah we know better. We went through all this 40 years ago and know that space is not profitable with our currant level of technoligy. We need to be able to travel faster than the speed of light to ever make any use of space.

This is just national pride stuff, good for them in any case.

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I don't agree. Space can be exploited with our current levels of tech. We just need to limit ourselves to working with the moon, Mars and the closer asteroids. With the Ion Engine, we can get an acceleration of almost 1g and keep it up for a long time. It would allow a ship to get to Mars in weeks not years. Of course it wil be made in China and used by the Indians not us. I did hear that NASA is working on FTL drives ("Warp six Mr Sulu." "Aye Aye Captain Singh") and IBM is working on a transporter ("Beam me up Mr. Chang")

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And then it will have to slow down in order to land. That would be possible. The real dilemma with Mars is that it has a larger gravity well than the moon, about 40% of earth's.

Escape velocity from the moon is 5321 mph. From Earth, 25,039 mph. From Mars, 11,178.

I suppose it would be possible to have an orbiting mother ship and a smaller lander, in fact it would all most have to be that way. Even so, that's a lot of extra fuel any ship blasting off from earth would have to carry. And the vessel departing Mars is not going to have the benefit of Cape Canaveral like facilities.

When all is said and done, space exploration is the final and most absurd manifestation of human arrogance. The mission to the moon was inevitable, given the years of dreaming about. One of the main things we learned: it's an utterly dead rock.

Oh yeah, we're going to be able to terraform Mars.

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We also know that in order to be able to leave this solar system, we have to develope a way to freeze the human body,so as to suspend it while the ship tavels to its destination . As of today the red blood cells explode rendering them useless after being frozen. If the human race is to survive ,we have to leave this solar system, not enough room on all the other planets for all the bodys.