Free Ride

In addition to five Indian instruments, Chandrayaan-I will be carrying, gratis, two instruments from NASA, one from Bulgaria and three from the European Space Agency:

MiniSAR: The miniature imaging radar instrument’s main aim is to map polar ice deposits on the moon. Discovered in 1994 and confirmed in 1998, their total volume, thickness and composition continue to elude scientists. ‘‘The imaging radar can ‘see’ into the dark regions of the poles and map the ice by its distinctive radio properties,’’ says its proponent Paul Spudis of the Applied Physics Laboratory, Johns Hopkins University, one of the foremost inter-planetary scholars today.

M3: The moon mineral mapper designed by Carle Peiters of Brown University hopes to tap, among other things, the richest sources of Helium-3, an element known to be abundant on the lunar surface. It is a possible source of energy for futuristic fusion nuclear reactors.

RADOM: The radiation dose monitor from Bulgaria, proposed by Tsvetan Dachev of the Solar-Terrestrial Influences Laboratory at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences will look to measure solar wind particle flux, energy spectrum and radiation dose map around the moon. ‘‘The Bulgarian payload is a meaningful experiment,’’ says Dachev.

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SARA: The sub-KeV atom reflecting analyser, pushed by Stas Barabash of the Swedish Institute of Space Physics and Anil Bhardwaj of the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, Thiruvananthapuram, will image the surface magnetic anomalies and lunar surface composition in search of volatile rich areas. ‘‘It’s a novel experiment never performed before,’’ says Barabash.

SIR-2: The near-infrared spectrometer from Urs Mall of the Max Planck Institute of Aeronomie, Germany, will study in detail the geological and mineralogical aspects of the lunar surface from the circular polar orbit. ‘‘We hope to throw light on the cause of the global asymmetry of the moon, which causes the far side to have a thicker crust than the near side,’’ says Mall.

CIXS: The Chandrayaan-I X-ray spectrometer is a low-energy measuring device that will conduct high-quality X-ray spectroscopic mapping of the moon using X-ray fluorescence spectra. Manuel Grande of the Space Physics Division of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, UK, says the data will ‘‘elucidate key questions on origin and evolution of the moon’’.