Chandrayaan 1, India's First Lunar Probe Options

[ljk4-1]

Chandrayaan Lunar Mission Will Carry NASA Payload

http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Chandray...SA_Payload.html

Bangalore, India (SPX) May 1, 2006 - ISRO has agreed to carry two NASA research
instruments aboard its Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, the Indian lunar-orbiting
mission planned for launch next year, The Hindu newspaper reported Sunday.


ISRO Pushing For Indian Satellite Industry

http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/ISRO_Pus...e_Industry.html

Bangalore, India (SPX) May 1, 2006 - ISRO is looking to jump-start an Indian
satellite industry by inviting prospective domestic contractors to work with the
agency until they can develop independent manufacturing capabilities.

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

Very nice description of Chandrayaan's science payload at http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2006/pdf/1704.pdf . Looks well-designed -- if Japan's Selene-1 fails, this one will make a good backup. (Note, by the way, that it carries THREE separate near-IR spectrometers.)

[RNeuhaus]

A very interesting project since it is the Indian's lunar spacecraft mission. India has already developed many spacecraft, all of them for telecomunications, science and meteorological purposes around the Earth. India has own rocket technology which is based of cyrogenic liquid.

The spacecraft will be launched on a PSLV C5 (Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle) from the Satish Dhawan Space Center in Sriharikota on the southeast coast of India in September of 2007 at the earliest. The PSLV will inject Chandrayaan-1 into a 240 x 36000 km geosynchronous transfer orbit. After a 5.5 day lunar transfer trajectory the spacecraft will be captured into an initial 1000 km near circular orbit which will be lowered to a 200 km checkout orbit and finally into a 100 km circular polar orbit. It will stay in orbit and return data for at least two years. Chandrayaan is Hindi for "Moon Craft". Total cost of the mission is about $100 million U.S.

The price tag of the Chandrayaan-1 is not cheap and it sounds about right. It will bring many scientific instruments.

Hope it will success since it is labeled as a high risk project since it is the first project ones.

Rodolfo

[ljk4-1]

NASA Agrees to Cooperate With India on Lunar Mission

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.nl.html?pid=19798

"NASA will have two scientific instruments on India's maiden voyage to the moon.

Tuesday, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin and his counterpart, Indian Space
Research Organization Chairman G. Madhavan Nair, signed two Memoranda of
Understanding in Bangalore, India, for cooperation on India's Chandrayaan-1
mission."

[ljk4-1]

India Space Agency Dreams Of Lunar Ice Mines

http://www.moondaily.com/reports/India_Spa..._Mines_999.html

Discussing the aforesaid programme of ISRO, chairman PRI council, ISRO-DOS, Prof UR Rao said: "The mission aims to search for surface or sub-surface water-ice on the moon, specially at the lunar pole and to carry out high resolution mapping of topographic features in 3D. It would also look into the mineral composition of the moon." Rao, who is also Chancellor of Ambedkar University, was in the city on Tuesday.

[GravityWaves]

Outsourcing NASA to India ?

[GravityWaves]

Indian scientist spearheads ISRO-NASA joint moon exploration
http://www.newindpress.com/NewsItems.asp?I...e&Topic=166

India's lunar ambitions
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/HK07Df01.html

[GravityWaves]

Mooncraft, India’s the First Dream Spacecraft
http://press-releases.techwhack.com/7850/m...;cid=1114129887

[GravityWaves]

India's first mission to moon 'Chandrayaan I' this year, manned mission to earth's satellite in 2014, landing on Mars in 2020 and perhaps colonisation of the red planet later. That's Indian space think tank's list of missions for the future. ..


http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Cities/...how/1690309.cms

"The day time temperatures are about 20 degrees Celsius though night time temperatures are low. We should be able to build an atmosphere without much problem. Then, we could send half our population there," said Physical Research Laboratory council chairman and former Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) chief

[Marz]

"We should be able to build an atmosphere without much problem. Then, we could send half our population there,"



I suppose if you have the means to lob 300+ million people into space (presumably safely), then building an atmosphere is relatively simple.

[Rakhir]

Only three months from the next lunar mission.
http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEM6563MDAF_index_0.html

[mps]

Chandrayaan 1 could launch in September
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/India/M...how/3115579.cms

[Redstone]

Now NET second week of October.

Times of India article

[Guest_Zvezdichko_*]

Hey, Lunar enthusiasts, wake up!

http://en.rian.ru/world/20081007/117525754.html

Launch now sheduled for October 22

[djellison]

I just finished doing some quick little animations for the C1XS team. It's not a great 3d model of Chandrayaan-1 (it was quite hard to get good details) but the X-Ray spectrometer looks good thanks to help from RAL. It's a bit annoying that the quality of bump maps/textures for the moon is much worse than for Mars - we need this flotilla (Kaguya, Chang-e 1, Chandrayaan-1 and LRO ) to do their thing before we can have realistic data to make better animations . Meanwhile -a few stills attached, I'll leave it up to the C1XS team to release the finished thing. No - it's not vacuuming up skittles....those are Xrays silly

It should make it on ESA's coverage of the launch ( they are involved with C1XS ), the C1XS website, and maybe the national media here in the UK will pick it up as well

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