Monday, August 17, 2009

India ready with Chandrayaan-2 design

Silicon India
Bangalore: National space agency, Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) has completed the design of Chandrayaan-2, with the collaboration of Russia's Federal Space Agency (Roskosmos). Chandrayaan-2 consists of the spacecraft and a landing platform with the moon rover, which can collect samples of the lunar soil and analyze them and send back the data. India will be building the orbital flight vehicle, while the 'Lunar Craft' will be supplied by Russia
On completion of the design, G Madhavan Nair, Chairman, ISRO said, "Right now, the design has been completed. We had a joint review with Russian scientists." According to the Bangalore-headquartered space agency, the Chandrayaan-2 mission would have an orbital flight vehicle comprising an Orbital Craft (OC) and a Lunar Craft (LC) that would carry a soft landing system up to Lunar Transfer Trajectory (LTT).

Nair said, "The landing of the rover would be decided after we analyze the data sent by Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft. Now we are set to build a prototype of Chandrayaan-2 and this would happen next year. We will build upon our success with Chandrayaan-1."

ISRO had gained lot of positives from the first lunar mission and received valuable inputs on heat radiation on the moon's surface. The ISRO Chief said that 95 percent of the scientific objective of Chandrayaan-1 mission had been achieved and the remaining five percent of what was left out would be taken up during the next season starting this October.

"The redundancy factor would be the utmost on the minds of the scientists working on Chandrayaan-2 after their good experience with the first mission," said Nair

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