Moon mission left a wealth of scientific data,rare pictures

Though some of the objectives will no doubt remain incomplete,the mission did provide a wealth of scientific data,including some brilliant pictures that will throw new light on man’s knowledge of moon. The spacecraft completed more than 3,400 revolutions around the moon during its 312-day stay in space and sent back large amount of data from sensors like the Terrain Mapping Camera,Hyper-spectral Imager and Moon Mineralogy Mapper.

Barely a week back,Chandrayaan-I and NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO),which is also orbiting the moon,carried out a joint experiment that can yield additional information on the possibility of ice or water near the north pole of moon.

Earlier in the year,in April,NASA’s payload on Chandrayaan-I,Mini-SAR — one of the 11 onboard the spacecraft that made it maximum number on any lunar mission in the history — had earlier sent some amazing photographs that would help in a better mapping of the moon’s surface.

“The new radar images are not only visually arresting,but they will be extremely useful in unravelling the complex geological history of the moon as a whole,” Paul Spudis of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston,who is the principal investigator for the Mini-SAR instrument,was quoted in a NASA statement then.

The most active — and exciting — phase of the life of Chandrayaan-I however came within the first three months of its launch on October 22 last year. After entering the lunar orbit in a copybook fashion on November 12,the spacecraft fired the Moon Impact Probe (MIP),a 35-kg cube shaped instrument with Indian Tricolour on all its four sides,which landed on the moon and became the first Indian object to leave its imprint on the moon’s surface.

Chandrayaan-I had its share of problems as well. Scheduled to enter the ‘operational phase’ in the second-half of November last year,ISRO had to delay switching on its instruments because of a rise in temperature inside the spacecraft.

In April this year,the spacecraft developed a serious technical snag with one of the sensors,used for determining the orientation of the spacecraft on the basis of its distance from stars,starting to malfunction. The problem had been fixed by ISRO scientists but when the issue became public last month,ISRO chairman G Madhavan Nair did not rule out calling off the mission ahead of its schedule,saying the mission had achieved most of its scientific objectives.