India plans landing near moon's south pole

[BjarneModerator Super Nova]

India plans tricky and unprecedented landing near moon’s south pole

BENGALURU, INDIA—Sometime this summer, a spacecraft orbiting over the moon’s far side, out of contact with controllers on Earth, will release a lander. The craft will ease to a soft landing just after lunar sunrise on an ancient, table-flat plain about 600 kilometers from the south pole. There, it will unleash a rover into territory never before explored at the surface; all previous lunar craft have set down near the equator.

That’s the ambitious vision for India’s second voyage to the moon in a decade, due to launch in the coming weeks. If Chandrayaan-2 is successful, it will pave the way for even more ambitious Indian missions, such as landings on Mars and an asteroid, as well a Venus probe, says Kailasavadivoo Sivan, chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) here. Chandrayaan-2, he says, is meant to show that India has the technological prowess “to soft land on other heavenly bodies.”

But lunar scientists have much at stake, too. “There has been a rebirth of lunar exploration across the globe, and India can’t be left behind,” says Mylswamy Annadurai, director of the ISRO Satellite Centre. Instruments aboard the lander and rover will collect data on the moon’s thin envelope of plasma, as well as isotopes such as helium-3, a potential fuel for future fusion energy reactors. The orbiter itself will follow up on a stunning discovery by India’s first lunar foray, the Chandrayaan-1 orbiter, which found water molecules on the moon in 2009. Before that, “It was kind of a kooky science to think that you’d find water” there, says James Greenwood, a cosmochemist at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. “Now, we’re arguing about how much water, and not whether it has water or not.” Cameras and a spectrometer aboard the Chandrayaan-2 orbiter could help settle that question.

The $150 million mission was originally meant to fly 3 years ago, but Russia failed to deliver a promised lander, prompting India to go it alone. Final preparations are underway on the Chandrayaan-2 spacecraft, which will launch from the Sriharikota spaceport on the Bay of Bengal aboard India’s Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle.

A landing so far from the lunar equator is especially tricky. “It is a difficult and complicated mission,” says Wu Ji, director of the National Space Science Center in Beijing. Less sunlight reaches the poles, which means the lander and rover must be parsimonious with power. The plan is to set down in a high plain between two craters, Manzinus C and Simpelius N, at a latitude of about 70° south.

 

 

[Forfatter]

Indlæg