A moon too far!

 

 

India’s first mission to Moon, Chandrayaan-1, scheduled for a launch in April, is likely to be postponed to June. An official note in this regard was released by Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) on Tuesday. “A number of issues relating to the integration of the scientific payloads with the main lunar orbiter are yet to be sorted out and this has caused the delay,” Chandrayaan-1 project director Mylaswamy Annadurai said. He further added that of the 11 scientific payloads - five Indian and six foreign - four international payloads have been integrated into the orbiter and the remaining seven are in an advanced stage of integration, and the process will be completed by March end. Nevertheless, he said a final call on the launch date would be taken later this month.

Chandrayaan-1 is India’s first attempt to send a spacecraft beyond Earth orbit since ISRO was founded in 1969. It had earlier planned to launch its initiative in early 2008 and orbit the Moon for approximately 2 years at an altitude of 100 kilometres above the surface. The orbiter will weigh 1,050 kilograms, including a 55-kilogram instrument package and a 30-kilogram probe designed to penetrate the lunar surface. At the end of the mission ISRO expects to provide the scientific community an improved model of the moons gravity. This would be made possible with the highly accurate measurements of moons topography by a lunar laser ranging instrument and the digital elevation model derived from 3-D imageries obtained by the terrain mapping stereo camera.

The announcement of delay has come only days after The Planetary Society hosted an international panel on lunar exploration at the ISDC 06 conference in Los Angeles. The session included representatives from China, India, Japan, and the United States, all of which plan to launch lunar missions within the next few years, and the European Union, which is currently operating the lunar orbiter SMART-1. All the participants touted the value of international exchanges in space exploration and discussed the best models for future cooperation between different space agencies.