MOON MISSION TO COST Rs.386 CRORE
The unmanned Mission
to Moon is presently estimated to cost Rs.386 crore. Targeted
to be accomplished by 2008, India’s first mission to moon called
"Chandrayaan-I", will incorporate several new and unique
features. The spacecraft will have a dry weight of 525 kg in lunar
orbit and a mission life of two years. A Bi-propellant system
will take the craft from the Geostationary Transfer orbit to lunar
orbit. The same system will be good for orbit and altitude maintenance.
The telemetry tracking control will be in S-band and scientific
payload data transmission in X-band.
The new technologies
to be used in the spacecraft will be lithium-ion batteries, Gimballed
antenna system, miniaturised communication system, miniaturised
star sensor and spacecraft bus management. The new facilities
will include, Deep Space Network located in Bangalore with 1800
longitudinal shift with Goldstone in California, USA. This will
support the spacecraft at a slant range up to 4 lakh km for telemetry
tracking control and payload data reception. The 34 metre diameter
antenna has an uplink power of 2 KW. A National Science Data Centre
to process raw data into user-friendly format is to be set up
at a suitable location.
ISRO’s time-tested
war-horse PSLV will place the mooncraft into a Geo-synchronous
Transfer Orbit. Later the spacecraft will be manoeuvred and placed
in its final orbit, 100 km circular polar.
The payloads will
include a terrain mapping camera with 5 m spatial resolution and
40 km swath; a Hyper-spectral Imager, a Lunar Laser Ranging Instrument,
a Low-Energy X-Ray spectro-meter for measuring fluorescent X-rays
emanating from lunar surface and a high-energy X-ray mapping camera.
Scientific objectives
of the mission include, preparing 3-dimensional atlas of regions
of scientific interest and chemical mapping of the entire lunar
surface, besides proving India’s technological capability. The
technological upgradation involved in the mission would provide
several spin-offs in the areas of mineral prospecting, power generation,
communication systems etc.
