SRIHARIKOTA: Indian Space Research Organisation will launch an unmanned space mission to orbit around the earth in 2013 as a prelude to its manned mission, to get an idea of the space environment and how the system behaves.
Isro chairman K Radhakrishnan told this to reporters after the successful launch of PSLV-C15 on Monday. “We are planning to send two humans into space and bring them back successfully. Work on this project is being done in phases Read more
Earth-based radar image of the North Pole of the Moon, showing the position of the crater Erlanger (arrow). Photo: Arecibo Observatory and NASA
Houston: Scientists have discovered moon’s biggest and deepest crater - some 2,400 km long and 9 km deep - using data from a NASA instrument that flew aboard India’s maiden unmanned lunar mission Chandrayaan—I.
The US Space agency’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) detected the enormous crater - the South Pole -Aitken basin - that was created when an asteroid smacked into moon’s southern hemisphere shortly after the formation of earth’s only natural satellite. Read more
Scientists have detected more than 40 ice—filled craters in the moon’s North Pole using data from a NASA radar that flew aboard India’s Chandrayaan—I.
NASA’s Mini—SAR instrument, lightweight, synthetic aperture radar, found more than 40 small craters with water ice. The craters range in size from 2 to 15 km in diameter.
The finding would give future missions a new target to further explore and exploit, a NASA statement said, adding it is estimated that there could be at least 600 million metric tons of water ice in the craters. Read more
Bangalore: India’s maiden moon probe Chandrayaan-I has developed a malfunction that puts some experiments in jeopardy and raises questions on completion of the mission that was intended to last two years.
“Unfortunately, during the last month we have lost a vital sensor — the star sensor,” Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) Chairman G Madhavan Nair said.
He said space scientists had tried to work around the problem and patched two other instruments to help manoeuvre the spacecraft to the desired locations. Read more
MUMBAI: Chandrayaan-1 has become the only space craft orbiting the moon after the mission by Japan ended on Wednesday night.
India attained the unique status at 11.55 pm when Japanese mooncraft Kaguya crashed on the southern side of the moon. Kaguya had carried out lunar observations for 17 months since its launch on September 14, 2007. Read more
From its firm perch in the lunar orbit, Chandrayaan-1 has sent back its newest images, one of them being its first full-Earth image captured in late March by the Terrain Mapping Camera (TMC) on board. Read more
Finer details of a lunar crater captured by TMC
ISRO Chairman G. Madhavan Nair announced that the Chandrayaan has sent more than 40,000 images to the base station in the last two months.
These images are currently being analyzed and will undoubtedly prove invaluable to the scientific community. The ISRO chief said that while there were many lunar missions in the past, none of them has been able to provide comprehensive data in the form of images so detailed. Read more
Bangalore: India’s first lunar endeavor with the Chandrayaan reached new heights with the Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) taking a composite image of a region of the moon about which very little was known earlier.
The M3, designed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, USA, provides detailed compositional information regarding the moon a thing which has never been done before. The region that was mapped recently is called the Orientale Basin. Different wavelengths of light captured in the image provide new insights into the composition of the region.
Carle Pieters, the instrument’s principal investigator, from Brown University, in a statement, said, “Our ability to now identify and map the composition of the surface in geologic context provides a new level of detail needed to explore and understand Earth’s nearest neighbor.” Read more
NEW DELHI: The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) on Wednesday said that the design for Chandrayaan II has been completed and it will be launched by 2012.
“The designs for Chandrayaan II have been completed and we hope to launch it by 2012,” ISRO chairperson G Madhavan Nair told reporters here on the sidelines of a function organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) to felicitate the Chandrayaan I team.
The Chandrayaan II project is slated to land a small rover on the moon’s surface and collect and analyse samples, he said. Read more
