By IPS Correspondents
SRIHARIKOTA, Oct 23 2008 (IPS)

With the successful launch of its maiden, unmanned mission to the moon, India has signalled growing confidence as an emerging Asian space power, ready to rub shoulders with Japan and China.

Chandrayaan's looping path to the moon. Credit: ISRO

Japan launched its first lunar orbiter Hiten in 1990 and China sent up its Change-1 orbiter is September 2007.

India’s Chandrayaan – meaning moon vehicle in Sanskrit – launched Wednesday from this spaceport, a small island in the Bay of Bengal, aims for the first total comprehensive mapping of the moon, says project director Mylswami Annadurai. Previous lunar missions by other countries have provided patchy data.

Using a combination of 11 instruments – five Indian and six from the U.S. and Europe, the spacecraft will map the moon in various wavelengths of light and bands of energy, for two years, positioning itself at 100 kms off the surface of the moon by November.

This will not only help Indian scientists study the moon’s rock and air composition, but also deduce how water could have flowed on it once and identify the best potential sites for setting up bases on the earth’s ‘companion’.

“This is a unique mission and one which will undertake a total mapping of the lunar surface, its hills and valley and craters,” ISRO chairman Gopalan Madhavan Nair said soon after the launch.

With the launch of Chandrayaan, India space scientists sent several key messages.

For one, compared to other space-faring nations, the Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO’s) missions are cost-effective. Chandrayaan cost ISRO 80 million US dollars, compared to Japan’s Selene mission’s 480 million dollars, or China’s Change-E1 mission that cost 187 million dollars. The European Space Agency (ESA’s Small Mission for Advanced Research in Technology (SMART-1) in 2003 cost 140 million dollars.

The Chandrayan mission symbolises a growing trend for western nations to collaborate with Indian space endeavours, instead of clamping sanctions on ‘dual-use’ technologies and isolating the country. Both space and nuclear technology have military applications.

Chandrayaan carries on board two U.S. instruments; a ‘miniature small aperture radar’ or mini-SAR to image the permanently shadowed regions of the moon, and a ‘moon mineralogy mapper’ for detailed mapping of minerals on the moon’s surface.

Ironically, it was the U.S. that once led the technology embargoes against ISRO, many of which are expected to be lifted, following the passing of the Indo-U.S. nuclear cooperation deal by the U.S. Senate this month.

The spaceraft also carries upgraded versions of two spectrometers carried on ESA’s SMART-1 mission, one made by Germany’s Max Planck Institute of Solar System Science and the other by Britain’s Rutherford Appleton Laboratory.

Also on board is an instrument to measure radioactivity on the moon’s surface, made by the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.

Chandrayaan has “set an example of international cooperation for space exploration,” notes Nair. It signifies a “new chapter” not only for ISRO but also the global community, he says.

ISRO scientists are also countering the long-standing argument of critics that India can ill-afford to spend money on expensive space projects, when this country is still mired in poverty.

Nair asserts three points. First is the meagre ISRO annual budget of one billion dollars, compared to the 20 billion dollars of the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

Secondly, with this small budget, India is the only country to use hi-tech space research for development, with a combination of satellites for telecommunications, weather forecasting, crops and education. “Even western nations have recognised this,” he says. “We are sharply focused on our objectives and work in mission mode,” he says.

The third is that ISRO uses 80 percent of its budget for development-related missions and the remaining 15 percent for advanced research and missions such as Chandrayaan, Nair said.

At an international astronauts’ congress in September 2007 in Hyderabad, Nair had described ISRO’s new focus on the moon and Mars missions as a “second vision” for ISRO.

As part of this second vision, ISRO has on its agenda three more missions to the moon, and one to the Mars. ISRO is aiming for a second lunar mission by the end of 2010 or early 2011, carrying a Russian-made rover that will collect rock and soil samples from the moon’s surface for further analysis.

By 2015 India hopes to send up two astronauts to study the moon; and even land astronauts on the moon by 2020. Nair also says that Mars is the “next natural destination for ISRO’’, though this is still at a conceptual stage.

Renewed international interest in the moon is spurred by possible commercial exploitation of the moon’s resources, especially helium-3 which is considered one of the cleanest sources of energy.

“We do not want to lag behind in the international quest for the moon’s resources,” said Annadurai.

Such ambitious plans call for a huge jacking up of rocket technology for ISRO, with changes needed to be made to its Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV), a home-made rocket that sends two-ton INSAT satellites into orbit for telecommunication, broadcasting and weather services.

“There is a huge complex challenge,” notes ISRO scientist N Narayanamurthy. ‘’The spacecraft to be used will differ from Chandrayaan-1, and ISRO is still new to technologies involving soft-landing of the moon rover, or building spacecraft for human stay.’’

Indeed, even in the Chandrayaan mission, ISRO faces several first-time technology tests, such as the deep sea tracking network using a 32-metre diameter antennae (at Bylalu village near Bangalore), injecting the spacecraft into a lunar trajectory, or understanding how the solar wind and other planetary movements will affect the spacecraft’s path in a moon’s orbit.

“There are many uncertainties and unknowns associated with the present mission,” admitted Nair.

Excerpt: