India's Moon Exploration Program

[shiphone]

I'm afraid that's not YuTu rover but a early stage Concept mock-up...it should be a product from Shanghai R&D team lost to the Beijing team..it was displayed later on Shanghai Industry EXPO as a local industry achievement...
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one Item of the Chang'e 3 mission: filming each other between the Lander and Rover.

some GIF about how the Rover was deployed by the Lander

 

[Indx TechStyle]

And soon enough we need to decide on long term pattern of things .
What is our end goal on moon ??
A base , colonization??

ISRO is planning to set up a telescope on Moon in Long Term to observe space.

Over that, Chandryaan 2 will survey about Helium 3, an essential energy source, ISRO officials have many times expressed about it.

Go through the previous pages of thread.

So, India's long term aim must be setting up laboratories for research and mining on Moon.

Yup, exactly, but I would certainly like a Mangalyaan-2 with a good lander and rover launched by a LVM3, maybe I am too optimistic :biggrin2:

Hold your horses and don't be too optimistic. It will not be a rover.
It's a heavy orbiter and officially confirmed now, like India's version of MAVEN. Pictures will be posted when design will be released next space expo.:biggrin2:
Actually, we had earlier plans to have a heavy orbiter as Mgy-1 but GSLV failed pathetically and ISRO sent a small orbiter, actually a demonstrator given limited capacity of PSLV. Now, with new equipments, Mgy-2 orbiter will go there between 2018-20.

Don't expect India's Martian Lander Rover before Mangalyaan 3. Don't know about you but I'm happy with decision. I was enough of light missions and look, AS Kiran Kumar heard me.
http://defenceforumindia.com/forum/threads/indian-mission-to-mars.35020/page-41#post-1192025

http://defenceforumindia.com/forum/threads/indian-mission-to-mars.35020/page-41#post-1192959

 

[Akask kumar]

Here's a model of Yutu Rover. Looks beautiful!

BTW, as per Japanese rover weighs 5-10 more kg than ours, both scheduled for launch on nearly same time.

India needs to.operationalize LVM3 ASAP. And if it gets this December, I won't mind if mission gets delayed for a short period to undertake a heavier mission to the Moon instead. @Akask kumar

no our rover can do better surface analysis than YUTU despite small and light.. plus this is just a demonstration of soft landing.. later in CDY3 we can do whatever we want (return,little digging) as GSLV MK3 will be operational and trustworthy by then.

CHINESE are exception here who want to try both orbit insertion and landing on mars in one go in first attempt.. i had warned about this before.. a good example is ESA and Russia joint mission EXOMARS.. which failed at landing. but succeeded in orbiting . the difference here is , they have orbit insertion capability struggling with landing capability while chinese have neither and yet want to try out both..GOOD LUCK TO THEM..

 

[Akask kumar]

I'm afraid that's not YuTu rover but a early stage Concept mock-up...it should be a product from Shanghai R&D team lost to the Beijing team..it was displayed later on Shanghai Industry EXPO as a local industry achievement...
-------------

one Item of the Chang'e 3 mission: filming each other between the Lander and Rover.

some GIF about how the Rover was deployed by the Lander

i always wanted to thank a chinese from long time for proving that MOON is not painted in a monochromatic color rather its somewhat colorful, green,red, greay ,black.. etc color can be seen in many images.. KUDOS for selecting a good sight which was not dusty thereby busting another myth attached to the moon

 

[Indx TechStyle]

no our rover can do better surface analysis than YUTU despite small and light.. plus this is just a demonstration of soft landing.. later in CDY3 we can do whatever we want (return,little digging) as GSLV MK3 will be operational and trustworthy by then.

CHINESE are exception here who want to try both orbit insertion and landing on mars in one go in first attempt.. i had warned about this before.. a good example is ESA and Russia joint mission EXOMARS.. which failed at landing. but succeeded in orbiting . the difference here is , they have orbit insertion capability struggling with landing capability while chinese have neither and yet want to try out both..GOOD LUCK TO THEM..

With so many small devices, Cdy-2 and Mgy-1 were demonstrators at first place.

We'll only find something substantial at Cdy-3 (possibly nuclear) and Mgy-2.

 

[Indx TechStyle]

TEAM INDUS

ABOUT US

Team Indus has won one Milestone Prize: the Landing Prize, for a total of $1 million in prize winnings...so far! (See the complete $30 million in prizes that are available)

Team Indus, the only Indian team in the Google Lunar XPRIZE competition, is building a privately funded Spacecraft capable of soft landing on the Moon by 2017. Team Indus was one of five teams selected to compete in the Milestone prizes and successfully won $1M as a Milestone prize for our landing technology, last year.

Team Indus' Mission is a celebration of all things great about India – the audacious goal, the young bright engineers, the can-do entrepreneurial spirit, partners who commit their resources, and the new breed of world-class entrepreneurs who have supported our mission – all of whom are united by a vision to deliver a best-in-class technology outcome entirely out of India.

With the turn of events in 2016, our chances of making it to the Moon have significantly increased and we are on our way to becoming the very first privately funded space exploration mission ever.

TEAM MEMBERS
Rahul Narayan
Dilip Chabria Sheelika Ravishankar
Nirmal Suraj

TEAM LEADER:
Rahul Narayan
LOCATION:
New Delhi, India
Copyright: GLXP

 

[Indx TechStyle]

India’s First Private Moon Rover Will Launch One Week Before $30m Deadline
TeamIndus was founded in 2010 to become the first private entity from India to put a rover on the moon by 2017. How is it faring?

The rover that TeamIndus is building and will hope to operate on the moon’s surface around December 2017. Credit: TeamIndus

Bengaluru: To win the international Google Lunar XPrize, a private team must build a rover, launch it to the moon, ensure it travels for at least 500 metres on the lunar surface and sends back hi-def images and videos – all by December 2017. And the only team from India and still in the race is cutting it real close. TeamIndus, based out of Bengaluru, India, hopes to make it in the last week of the last month of the contest onboard a PSLV rocket. The detail was finalised earlier this month, historic because it is ISRO’s first sale of its launch vehicle to a private entity.

“I think we’re just about two-thirds of the way through,” says Rahul Narayan, founder of TeamIndus. “We’ve got two dozen suppliers, most of them international. All of their material needs to come in at the same time, with the right testing and qualifications.” But even so, he’s very optimistic of TeamIndus’s chances. “First to the launchpad? Highly likely. First to launch? Very, very likely. First to land on the moon? I think so.”

TeamIndus was founded in 2010 to crack the XPrize. Today, it counts over 80 engineers and a dozen scientists among its employees. And it plans to add more once a new round of funding brings $10-15 million into their kitty. Their office is located in north Bengaluru, in a simple white building off a busy highway, obscured by tall tress and vines draping its walls.

The chassis of an early model of TeamIndus’s rover has been parked just beyond the gate. It looks like a big old park bench with space for about four people to sit on; I don’t notice it until Narayan points it out. “That’s actually version two of our spacecraft, from 2013 – that’s how it used to look, that was the size of the spacecraft. The solar panels were flat and it had three engines at the bottom.”

Keeping it simple

The building’s blocks are named Aryabhatta, Bhaskara and C.V. Raman – the names of three of India’s most celebrated scientists. The first two have also had ISRO satellites named after them, but you’d be off if you thought there was a deeper meaning. Narayan likes to keep things simple. “ABC,” he clarifies, just like TeamIndus’s tagline: ‘Aspire. Believe. Create.’ The company’s employees have almost a spartan focus on the basics. Narayan doesn’t want to be “that sexy” or deploy something fancy. Instead, him and his colleagues are trying to build something that justworks.

They looked at some of the first American rovers conceived for Mars, which weighed about 20-25 kg and were designed to last for a few months on the red planet. With this choice, the problem they’d be solving for became easier to define: how do you land something that weighs about 25 kg on Mars? And then they worked backwards from there to figure out the whole mission.

The way things stand: in the last week of December 2017, a PSLV rocket will carry a spacecraft – whose launch mass will be around 600 kg – to an orbit about 70,000 km high. There, the spacecraft will orbit Earth twice, each time climbing in altitude by 10,000 km. Then, it will attempt a manoeuvre called a translunar injection and set itself en route to the moon.

Rahul Narayan

Once there, it will orbit the natural satellite for about two weeks before the spacecraft will deploy the rover, which will be moving through space at about 1.7 km/s at an altitude of around 12 km. Over the next 15 minutes, the rover will fire its sixteen attitude control thrusters and one primary thruster to descend on the lunar surface, moving down in a curved path. Once it touches down, it will send a signal back to Earth saying it’s reached safe. Then, the last phase of the mission will begin.

According to Narayan, the landing will be the most challenging part of their efforts because it will be completely autonomous. “Before we say, ‘Okay, you’re good to go’, we’ve to look at parameters starting from the state of charge of the battery, the orientation of the spacecraft, the condition of your knowledge about the spacecraft in terms of whether it’s in line with what you’ve predicted, etc., and only then you send the command to begin descent.” And once that happens, TeamIndus will only be receiving telemetry. Narayan compares the event to what happened when NASA landed Curiosity on Mars in 2012. Its descent phase was defined by seven minutes of silence from the rover, since called the ‘seven minutes of terror‘.

“Almost everybody comes and says, ‘We think you can do the engineering, let’s talk about the other stuff.’ But the engineering is the most complex job,” he laughs. “Every part of the mission has a ‘sphere’ within which it can operate”, a reference to the range of values each part can take on. He extends his thumb and index fingers: “The spacecraft can be here or here” – he points near either finger from within the gap – “but if it’s outside the sphere, then the mission will fail because we can’t predict what will happen next.” Before launch, the mission operations team charts out the entire spectrum of possibilities and within which Narayan says a million scenarios exist. And this is why it’s so important to define the mission’s conditions for success: depending on the desired outcome, the team has to decide beforehand what happens next in each scenario.

Different kinds of failure

In a similar vein, because various segments of the project present different levels of difficulty, TeamIndus also has a graded definition of failure. Narayan thinks that if, in hindsight, they discover that they didn’t get some things right on the drawing board, that’d be the worst for having spent so much time, energy and resources on as well as for what it would mean for the company’s reputation. But “if we build the entire spacecraft, qualify it, put it onto the launchpad” – all of which he thinks won’t really be a challenge – then it will be a success for their engineering team. Finally, if something goes wrong in-flight or after touchdown, Narayan isn’t too worried: “We’re doing it for the first time.”

At this point, he compares TeamIndus’s efforts to full-blown state-sponsored space agencies around the world that spend hundreds of millions of dollars and still can’t be absolutely certain of their chances of success. This is only fair because space isn’t easy. When it successfully began the Mars Orbiter Mission in September 2014, ISRO became the first national space agency to get that far on its first try. But at the same time, Narayan doesn’t think highly of the jugaad that many have attributed to this, especially considering recent reports that it was pulled off on a puny budget of Rs 447.39 crore.

"Jugaad" is Hindi for a make-do attitude that typifies a uniquely Indian brand of entrepreneurialism. Its presence is taken for granted (and so doesn’t elicit surprise) in undertakings that are pulled off against tough odds such as a lack of money or manpower, usually by substituting an ideal resource with one that is readily available or accessible. Of late, this attitude has cropped up when discussing satellites built by Indian universities as well. ISRO has many memoranda of understanding with institutions to ready and launch student-built satellites. However, these satellites often fail soon after they enter orbit and linger there as orbital debris.

A diagram of the spacecraft that will fly onboard the PSLV rocket and carry the rover. Credit: TeamIndus

“How do a group of 20 students and three professors get together, work on a satellite for three years and spend Rs 20 lakh on the hardware?” Narayan begins cautiously. “If you just looked at the value of their time, it’s an order of magnitude more than that. It’s bound to cost Rs 2 or 3 crore, so at some point you need to stop doing jugaad and start focusing on what you need to do. Instead of spending Rs 2 lakh or 20 lakh, if they spent about a crore and actually built something that worked, it would make a whole lot more sense – rather than take so many shortcuts” and then simply not succeed.

A graded definition of failure also has implications for the cash reward the XPrize carries for the first team that achieves all its objectives: $30 million. Though the stipulated deadline is December 2017 and it looks like TeamIndus’s at least two-week-long mission will begin only in the last week of that month, Narayan thinks there’s some ambiguity in the language there that will see them through. Plus there are only three other teams that have had their launch contracts verified by the contest’s organisers (Narayan is sure theirs will be too, by the January 1, 2017, deadline) – down from the 29 that had initially applied. But even if TeamIndus is the first to get on the launchpad, the reward’s quantum indicates that wouldn’t entirely be the point anymore.

According to Narayan, the mission has cost TeamIndus Rs 400 crore – almost $59 million. So winning the XPrize a year down the line would be a glorious stepping stone: landing on the moon would do a world of good for the “trajectory of the team, of the company, of the country, so to speak”. But it’d be a stepping stone nonetheless, towards the company’s moving on to bigger things. Specifically, Narayan says they want to build as well as provide services for 150-kg-class satellites, a class that has been becoming increasingly popular for its fast turnarounds. “That’s one of the natural segues for us as a team” – a team he feels has been easier to bring together given what they’re trying to do but in an ecosystem that’s mostly devoid of talent.

Controlling the narrative

Yet another source of revenue closer to now is to sell what data TeamIndus’s spacecraft and rover collect to ISRO. He’s not clear about the exact timeframe but there’s a general awareness that the next big Indian rover mission after TeamIndus’s will be ISRO’s own Chandrayaan 2, also slated for the moon. However, Narayan clarifies that there has been no formal discussion on that. “Right now, we’re trying to get the contract and the cross-verification of the mission strategy out of the way. We’re already in touch with some of the other centres of ISRO that build payloads and might be interested.”

Apart from the launch vehicle, the contract gives TeamIndus access to some other mission-critical infrastructure. One is testing and getting the spacecraft ready for launch. The second: ground communications. During the launch and descent phases, the spacecraft/rover will communicate with engineers on Earth through ISRO’s Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network (ISTRAC), headquartered in Bengaluru. And via ISTRAC, TeamIndus will also have access to NASA’s Deep Space Network, a network of antennae that can ‘listen’ to satellites billions of kilometres away.

But even with this help, one deficiency shouts through. “We do not have a proper planetary sciences group,” says Narayan, which makes it harder to decide what line of research to pursue depending on which part of the moon their rover is going to explore (the current choice is a region called the Sea of Showers). India’s own planetary missions only kicked off with the Chandrayaan 1 in 2008 – while NASA and the European Space Agency have had such groups for many decades now. He hopes the XPrize mission will move things along.

Then again, leading up to this interview, TeamIndus’s staying away from the media until very recently has seemed like a deficiency, too. Narayan justifies it by saying he owes it to his team to “tightly control the narrative” and keep it focused on what they’re trying to do – instead of spending time clarifying that they’re not competing with Mars One, the European organisation that has promised to ferry some people on a one-way trip to Mars next decade. Such reports actually appeared in 2011, followed by some others that said TeamIndus had actually won the XPrize.

“We’ve been very circumspect, but going forward, we know that a lot of people are going to be a part of this. We’re putting together what could be a very public outreach campaign that gets more and more people involved,” Narayan explains. This campaign includes Lab2Moon, an invitation to innovators around the world to pitch a science experiment on the theme of ‘sustainable life on the moon’. TeamIndus, however, doesn’t expect anything groundbreaking: the spacecraft will only have room for something the size of a small water bottle. The first shortlist of 20 entries, choosing from over 3,000, is expected to be announced by next week. And once an experiment does go up, TeamIndus has promised what data it gathers will be all put in the public domain.

Julius Amrit, Narayan’s colleague, thinks it will be India’s Apollo moment – and why not? When John F. Kennedy addressed a joint session of the US Congress in May 1961, appealing them to fund efforts that would culminate in Apollo 11, he may well have been speaking of efforts underway right now: “For while we cannot guarantee that we shall one day be first, we can guarantee that any failure to make this effort will find us last. We take an additional risk by making it in full view of the world – but as shown by the feat of astronaut [Alan] Shepard, this very risk enhances our stature when we are successful. But this is not merely a race. Space is open to us now; and our eagerness to share its meaning is not governed by the efforts of others.”

Before you guys reach at any conclusion, le'me tell you that The Wire is an anti Modi Mag.

 

[Indx TechStyle]

Press Information Bureau ​

Government of India
Department of Space​

01-December-2016 16:43 IST​

Progress of Chandrayaan-2 Mission​

Chandrayaan-2, India’s second mission to the Moon, is a totally indigenous mission comprising of Orbiter, Lander and Rover. The Orbiter and Rover flight systems are in advanced stage of realisation. Payloads are under development at various ISRO Centres / laboratories. Realisation of indigenous Lander is in progress. Special tests for new systems in Lander have been identified and a Lander Sensors Performance Test (phase-1) over artificial craters created in Chitradurga district in Karnataka has been conducted. Lunar Terrain Test facility is ready for Lander drop test and Rover mobility tests.

The Orbiter carrying six payloads will orbit around the Moon in 100 km lunar orbit. The payloads will collect scientific information on lunar topography, mineralogy, elemental abundance, lunar exosphere and signatures of hydroxyl and water-ice.

ISRO is working towards the launch of Chandrayaan-2 during the first quarter of 2018.

This information was provided by the Union Minister of State (Independent Charge) Development of North-Eastern Region (DoNER), MoS PMO, Personnel, Public Grievances & Pensions, Atomic Energy and Space, Dr Jitendra Singh in a written reply to a question in Rajya Sabha today.

****
KSD/NK/1886​

 

[Indx TechStyle]

Aerospace startup Team Indus signs launch contract with ISRO

Team Indus

Bengaluru-based aerospace startup Team Indus has signed a contract with the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) to launch a spacecraft that will attempt to land on the moon as part of its bid to win the Google Lunar XPRIZE.

Team Indus, incorporated as Axiom Research Labs Pvt Ltd, is the only Indian team competing for the $30 million prize money in the Lunar XPRIZE challenge. To win the prize, privately-funded teams must land their spacecraft on the surface of the moon, travel 500 metres, and broadcast high-definition videos, images and data back to earth.

Team Indus is the fourth company, of the total 16 that have survived the heat till date, to sign a verified launch contract for 2017. Israel’s SpaceIL and American companies Moon Express and Synergy Moon are the other three.

“We see SpaceIL as our toughest competition. We are definitely going to be among the top two in the final challenge,” said CEO Rahul Narayan, who is confident of hoisting the tricolour on the surface of the moon.

The moon mission is costing Team Indus around $60 million (about Rs 410 crore). It has raised $15 million so far and is looking to raise more funds in 2017. Last year, Team Indus won $1 million for meeting significant milestones in developing a robot that can safely land on the moon, travel 500 metres and send so-called Mooncasts.

The startup said the spacecraft will be launched aboard ISRO’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle on 28 December 2017 from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre SHAR, Sriharikota, Andhra Pradesh.

“The ground centre will belong to ISRO. Once the spacecraft reaches above 800 km from earth, it will be completely controlled by Team Indus,” Narayan said at a press conference in New Delhi.

Starting up

Team Indus was founded in 2011 by a group of young space enthusiasts with no aerospace experience. “We are similar to SpaceX, not in terms of money but in terms of innovation,” co-founder Sridhar Ramasubban said, referring to US billionaire Elon Musk’s aerospace company.

While talking about the team’s journey from the time they launched, Narayan said the startup built the mission concept in 2013 and designed the system the next year. Their efforts materialised in 2014 and they got selected for the challenge and got the milestone prize. In 2015 and 2016, Team Indus has worked on designing and creating a prototype spacecraft that will be launched next year.

Team Indus is one of the few companies in India which have managed to attract marquee names as investors. The company is backed by the likes of Tata Sons interim chairman Ratan Tata, Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani, Flipkart founders Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, Sasken Communications’ Raji Mody and TVS Group’s Venu Srinivasan. It has also received funding from Jagdish Mehta of CTS India, Aspire Systems’s Gowri Subramanian, Anand Deshpande of Persistent Systems, and stock market investors Rakesh Jhunjhunwala, Ashish Kacholia and RK Damani.

“India is at the cusp of dramatic change. We are ready to take to the global stage in demonstrating a capability for building deep technology and competing with the best in the world,” said Nilekani. “I invested in Team Indus because they’re the face of New India, and I believe they will inspire the next generation of innovators and achievers.”

Business model

Team Indus has about 100 employees, of whom 20 are retired ISRO scientists. Other than working vigorously for this challenge, the company is firming up revenue models for itself and building a satellites business for both Indian and global markets.

Asked if ISRO could be one of their potential customers in future, Ramasubban said: “We will build and provide our satellite solutions and services to ISRO, and they will provide it to their end-customers. Today we are using them as our launch platform, but we will get into commercial engagements with ISRO.”

Ramasubban also said that only 25% of the team strength is working on the Google challenge, and the remaining people are working on building other businesses. “We will make a major announcement on our commercial engagement in the first quarter of next year,” he said, without disclosing any details.

 

[Indx TechStyle]

MOONSHOTS
An Indian team will launch the fourth private moon mission seeking the Google Lunar XPrize

An Indian PSLV rocket launches in 2014.(Reuters/Babu)

The global race back to the moon has a fourth entrant: TeamIndus, an Indian enterprise, has secured a contract with the Indian government for a rocket that will fly a probe to the moon in 2017 in an attempt to win the $30 million Google Lunar XPrize.

TeamIndus will be the first private entity to exclusively use India’s main rocket, the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle, which has flown satellites for countries around the world and launched India’s Mars orbiter in 2013.

Competitors hoping to win the Lunar XPrize must land a probe on the moon; use it to transmit photographs, video, and data back to earth; and move it some 500 meters across the lunar surface. The contest is designed to demonstrate the capabilities of the private space sector and to lay the groundwork for a future economy in space.

Team Indus’ main competitors for the prize are MoonExpress, an American company that aims to fly on a rocket built by the company Rocket Lab, and SpaceIL, an Israeli nonprofit that booked a flight on a SpaceX Falcon 9. Another international group, Team Synergy, plans to fly on an experimental rocket built by Interorbital Systems, a company owned by two of Synergy’s co-founders.

TeamIndus is alone among the competitors to announce a specific launch window, set for Dec. 28, 2017. The other competitors hope to launch sooner than that, but with SpaceX still grounded following its September accident, Rocket Labs still awaiting the first flight of its vehicle, and Interorbital’s rocket still under construction, it’s anyone’s game.

So far, only three governments—the USSR, the United States, and China—have landed functioning probes on the lunar surface.

TeamIndus leaders announce their launch contract. (TeamIndus)

TeamIndus boasts a 100-person engineering team, and describes itself as a group of young colts and older “jedi masters”—retired scientists from India’s space agency, the Indian Space Research Organization. The team is backed by a who’s-who of Indian business leaders, including Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani, Rana Tata of the Tata Group, and Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal of Flipkart.

“[India is] ready to take to the global stage in demonstrating a capability for building deep technology and competing with the best in the world,” Nilekani says. “I invested in TeamIndus because they’re the face of New India, and I believe they will inspire the next generation of innovators and achievers.”

The Google Lunar XPrize was announced in 2007 following the success of the Ansari X Prize, which offered $10 million to the first non-governmental organization to launch a reusable manned spacecraft twice in two weeks. The Ansari prize was won by the company Scaled Composites, with a vehicle that would be come the basis for Virgin Galactic’s still unrealized space tourism hopes.

Correction: An earlier version of this article omitted Team Synergy from the list of Lunar XPrize entrants with certified launch contracts.

 

[Indx TechStyle]

ISRO TO TAKE INDIAN PROJECT TO THE MOON & BACK
By Chetan R, Bangalore Mirror Bureau | Dec 2, 2016, 03.00 AM IST

TeamIndus has signed up with ISRO and will be the first private Indian company contracting a launch vehicle for a space mission, the first-ever private entity to soft-land on moon.

TeamIndus, a space technology private Indian enterprise, has entered a commercial launch contract with the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) for its historic mission to soft-land a spacecraft on the moon as part of its bid to win the Google Lunar XPRIZE. This mission would make TeamIndus the first private entity in the world to soft-land on the lunar surface, a feat previously accomplished by the USSR, USA and China through their government-run space agencies.

It is the only Indian team competing for the Google Lunar XPRIZE. The goal of the unprecedented $30 million Google Lunar XPRIZE is to ignite a new era of space exploration by lowering the cost and inspiring the imagination of the next generation.

In late 2017, seven years after a group of Indian entrepreneurs with no aerospace experience signed up to make an impossible dream come true, TeamIndus will launch its spacecraft bound for the moon aboard ISRO’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV). To win the Google Lunar XPRIZE, privately funded teams must land their spacecraft on the surface of the moon, travel 500 metres, and broadcast high definition video, images, and data back to earth.

The TeamIndus Spacecraft has been designed and developed in Bengaluru by a 100-member engineering team, including 20 retired ISRO scientists.

As per the agreement with ISRO, India’s premier space agency will carry the TeamIndus Spacecraft in a launch window that begins on December 28, 2017. ISRO’s PSLV will inject the spacecraft into an elliptical orbit of 880 km x 70,000 km around the earth, before the spacecraft undertakes a 21-day journey to soft-land in Mare Imbrium, a region in the north-western hemisphere of the moon. After landing in Mare Imbrium, the spacecraft will deploy all its payload including the TeamIndus Rover that will traverse 500 metres on the moon’s surface to accomplish its Google Lunar XPRIZE objectives.

Rahul Narayan, TeamIndus’ fleet commander, said, “What gave us confidence to dream big when we started on this journey many years ago was the heft of the scientific legacy that India, with ISRO, created over the decades. This launch contract reaffirms our mission as a truly Indian mission where the best of India’s public and private enterprises have come together to realise a common dream.”

In fact, when Bangalore Mirror met the Team Indus team in Bengaluru in September, they were worried about confirming a space agency to take their spacecraft to the moon.

They had to submit the confirmation before December 31. “We are delighted to officially verify TeamIndus’ launch contract,” said Chanda Gonzales-Mowrer, senior director, Google Lunar XPRIZE. “This is a notable achievement for TeamIndus, and we are proud to have one more team make it into the final stretch of this competition.”The Google Lunar XPRIZE started in 2007 with 30 teams from across the world. Over the course of the competition 14 teams dropped off. TeamIndus has so far gone from strength to strength and is now among the top five teams in contention to win the prize.

Nandan Nilekani, TeamIndus investor, Infosys co-founder and former chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), said: “India is at the cusp of a dramatic change. We are ready to take to the global stage in demonstrating a capability for building deep technology and competing with the best in the world. I invested in TeamIndus because they’re the face of New India, and I believe they will inspire the next generation of innovators and achievers.”

 

[Indx TechStyle]

So, further missions worldwide are planned.
First four are under GLXP competition but besides Changé 5, our hero Chandrayaan 2 will be the soonest upcoming Lunar exploration probe by a government space agency.

1. HHK-1 (by Team Indus) (2017)
2. Astrobotic Technology (2017)
3. Moon Express (2017, interestingly, it wants to demonstrate mining as well)
4. SpaceIL
5. Changé 5 (2017, sample return, China)
6. Chandryaan 2 (Q1 2018, lander, rover, and sample analyzing)
7. Changé 4 (Q4 2018, lander rover)
8. Lunar Flashlight (Q4 2018, USA)
9. Luanr Ice Cube (Q4 2018)
10. Luna H-map (Q4 2018)
11. Skyfire (Q4 2018)
12. Selene-2 (2019, Japan, lander and rover)

 

[Indx TechStyle]

Lander:

Rover:

Operator: Axiom Research Labs

Registered Team: Team Indus, a Google Lunar X Prize team

Mission type: Lunar Rover

Proposed Launch date: Q4-2017

Proposed trajectory: 9 Steps to Moon
1. G1 – Initial Orbit: 880 x 71,000 km
2. G2 – 48 hours
3. G3 – 144 hours
4. G4 – Lunar Transfer Trajectory
5. S1 – Initial Lunar orbit with capture burn of 250 seconds
6. S2 – Orbit lowered to 3500 km apolune
7. S3 – Parking orbit – 100 x 100 km
8. S4 – Orbit lowered 12.6 km perilune
9. Descent Trajectory – braking from 1.7 km/s

Launch vehicle:
PSLV operated by ISRO (proposed)

Launch site:
SDSC, Sriharikota (proposed)

Mission duration:
Flight duration: 30 days
Surface operations: 10-15 days

Orbital parameters:
Earth Inclination : 19.2 degrees
Moon Inclination: 143 degrees
Argument of Perigee: 178 degrees

Delta – V:
Orbital – 1270 m/s
Descent – 1940 m/s
Net – 3210 m/s

Mass:
Lift off Mass: ~ 600kgs
Propellant Mass: ~ 404 kg
Landed Mass: ~210 kg

Total Lunar Payload mass: ~ 20kgs

@Chinmoy @ezsasa

 

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Experiments (Chandrayaan 2):

CHACE-2 (CHandra's Atmospheric Composition Explorer-2) on Chandrayaan-2 Orbiter

The CHACE-2 experiment aboard the Chandrayaan-2 orbiter will study the neutral composition of the Lunar exosphere from a circular polar orbit of ~100 km. The CHACE-2 instrument will be similar to MENCA. Apart from obtaining mass spectra of the tenuous Lunar exosphere, the instrument will have capability of tracking the distribution of a pre-selected set of species with higher temporal resolution.

ChaSTE (Chandra’s Surface Thermophysical Experiment)

ChaSTE is one of the scientific experiment on the Lander of the Chandrayaan-2 mission. ChaSTE is a thermal probe with the objective of making in-situ measurements of temperature profile on the lunar surface up to a depth of 100 mm near the polar region, and the measurements of thermal conductivity of lunar regolith. ChaSTE would be the first-ever in-situ thermal measurements on lunar surface near the polar region.

RAMBHA (Radio Anatomy of Moon Bound Hypersensitive ionosphere and Atmosphere)

The RAMBHA experiment onboard the forthcoming Chandrayaan-2 Lander mission is a unique payload package that would provide a comprehensive exploration of Lunar plasma environment. RAMBHA is conceived as a suite of three experiments, viz. (i) a Langmuir Probe and (iii) a dual frequency radio science (DFRS) experiment.

 

[Adioz]

Lander:

Rover:

Operator: Axiom Research Labs

Registered Team: Team Indus, a Google Lunar X Prize team

Mission type: Lunar Rover

Proposed Launch date: Q4-2015

Proposed trajectory: 9 Steps to Moon
1. G1 – Initial Orbit: 880 x 71,000 km
2. G2 – 48 hours
3. G3 – 144 hours
4. G4 – Lunar Transfer Trajectory
5. S1 – Initial Lunar orbit with capture burn of 250 seconds
6. S2 – Orbit lowered to 3500 km apolune
7. S3 – Parking orbit – 100 x 100 km
8. S4 – Orbit lowered 12.6 km perilune
9. Descent Trajectory – braking from 1.7 km/s

Launch vehicle:
PSLV operated by ISRO (proposed)

Launch site:
SDSC, Sriharikota (proposed)

Mission duration:
Flight duration: 30 days
Surface operations: 10-15 days

Orbital parameters:
Earth Inclination : 19.2 degrees
Moon Inclination: 143 degrees
Argument of Perigee: 178 degrees

Delta – V:
Orbital – 1270 m/s
Descent – 1940 m/s
Net – 3210 m/s

Mass:
Lift off Mass: ~ 600kgs
Propellant Mass: ~ 404 kg
Landed Mass: ~210 kg

Total Lunar Payload mass: ~ 20kgs

@Chinmoy @ezsasa

Wow, lots of big CNC machining centers and lathes in the background of the video. They are not mass producing anything are they? So how do they justify the expense as opposed to outsourcing the manufacturing to another firm?

BTW, type error in launch date.

 

[Indx TechStyle]

Orbiter High Resolution Camera (OHRC) - National Remote Sensing Centre

 

[Indx TechStyle]

They are not mass producing anything are they?
So how do they justify the expense as opposed to outsourcing the manufacturing to another firm?

Here's what I know. Hope it helps.

Ramasubban also said that only 25% of the team strength is working on the Google challenge, and the remaining people are working on building other businesses. “We will make a major announcement on our commercial engagement in the first quarter of next year,” he said, without disclosing any details.

BTW, type error in launch date.

Thanks, corrected it.

 

[Indx TechStyle]

India to launch Chandrayaan-2 in early 2018 to search for minerals and water-ice on moon
The mission will look for, among other things, the abundance of minerals and presence of water-ice on Earth's only natural satellite.

India to launch Chandrayaan-2 in early 2018 to search for minerals and water-ice on moon. [Representational image] ISRO official website

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) will launch its second unmanned mission to the moon in the first quarter of 2018, and it will look for, among other things, the abundance of minerals and presence of water-ice on Earth's only natural satellite. However, the exact date of the launch has not been announced yet.

"ISRO is working towards the launch of Chandrayaan-2 during the first quarter of 2018," Union Minister of State for Atomic Energy and Space, Jitendra Singh, said in a written reply to a question in the Rajya Sabha, according to a statement from the Department of Space. He said it is a "totally indigenous mission comprising of orbiter, lander and rover."

ISRO already has a number of launches lined up for 2017, from which it looks to earn big moolah. The organisation has already earned more than $62 million from launches conducted for other countries in 2014-15. The Chandrayaan-2, however, will be an Indian launch, but the data gathered from it should be available to scientists across the world.

He added: "The orbiter and rover flight systems are in an advanced stage of realisation. Payloads are under development at various ISRO centres and laboratories. Realisation of an indigenous lander is in progress. Special tests for new systems in the lander have been identified and a Lander Sensors Performance Test (phase-1) over artificial craters created in the Chitradurga district in Karnataka has been conducted. A Lunar Terrain Test facility is ready for the lander drop and rover mobility tests."

It may be mentioned that ISRO Satellite Centre (ISAC) director M Annadurai had earlier said about the lander tests: "Tests are [being] conducted over the simulated craters at Chitradurga. We are using an aircraft to assess whether the sensors on the Lander will do their job [later] of identifying the landing spot on the Moon,"

About the contents of the spacecraft, he said: "The orbiter carrying six payloads will orbit around the Moon in 100 km lunar orbit. The payloads will collect scientific information on lunar topography, mineralogy, elemental abundance, lunar exosphere and signatures of hydroxyl and water-ice."

 

[Indx TechStyle]

Team Indus Announces Launch Contract with ISRO
Posted by Sandhya Ramesh
2016/12/01 22:45 UTC

TeamIndus, India’s only entry for the Google Lunar XPRIZE, just announced their launch contract with ISRO. If successful, TeamIndus would be the first private company from India to land a craft on an extraterrestrial body.

The Google Lunar XPRIZE (GLXP) is a competition for privately funded space companies to land a spacecraft on the Moon, deploy a rover to travel 500 meters on the surface and send back high-quality images and videos. The total prize money is $30 million, funded by Google. The winner would get $20 million, the runner up $5 million, and the other five is split across different milestone prizes through the course of the competition.

TeamIndus
Artist’s impression of the lander and rover on the lunar surface

TeamIndus will launch their craft atop India’s trusty PSLV rocket. The final launch date hasn’t been announced yet, but the end of December 2017 seems to be the most likely window. The team previously announced the landing spot will be on Mare Imbrium, a sprawling lava plain. This large region was chosen to maintain a line-of-sight between the lander and the rover. Once the lander settles itself on the soft Moon dust there, it will deploy its rover. The lander will act as a communication relay to Earth.

The spacecraft will also carry the winning experiment from Lab2Moon, an ongoing competition TeamIndus announced earlier this year. The competition is open to student teams of up to three members under the age of 25 who submit experiments that help enable humans to become a multi-planetary species. The lander will also contain a small cube containing names of citizens who have contributed funding to the mission. Additionally, the team is also in talks with commercial entities to send marketing materials to the Moon.

In December 2014, TeamIndus was the recipient of one of the technical challenge prizes as a part of this competition. Titled the Landing Milestone Prize, a total of three teams were awarded $1 million for a demonstration of the capability of their landing hardware and software.

The Launch
TeamIndus
Trajectory

For the launch from ISRO’s pad at Sriharikota, India, the PSLV rocket will carry the lander in its XL configuration. The payload, weighing 600 kilograms, will be injected into an 880-by-70,000 kilometer orbit, inclined at 19.2 degrees twelve minutes after launch. (70,000 km is the highest orbit provided by PSLV). The craft will then use two gravity assists around the earth, raising its apogee by 10,000 km the first time (G2; 80,000 km), and to 365,000 km the next (G3 to Lunar Transfer Trajectory), over a period of nine days to launch itself towards the Moon. At the Moon, the injection burn will let it enter an initial orbit of 100 by 6,700 kilometers (S1, as shown in the diagram). The orbit will then be lowered to 3,500 kilometers (S2), where the craft will be parked until sunrise over Mare Imbrium. There will then be another orbit-lowering maneuver bringing the apolune down to 100 kilometers. The craft will then go into a 100 kilometer circular orbit (S3). A final insertion burn will bring the perilune to 12.6 kilometers, from where descent onto the lunar surface would begin. This entire capture and descent sequence is expected to last a week, bringing the total time of the trip to 15 days.

TeamIndus
Mission overview

Ground stations communicating with the spacecraft would be India’s ISRO Telemetry, Tracking, and Command Network (ISTRAC), Indian Deep Space Network (IDSN-Byalalu), and NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN).

The lander and rover have a lifespan of one lunar day (14 Earth days) on the surface.

The Rover

The rover has undergone several design iterations over the past three years as shown below:

TeamIndus
Design changes, from right to left

TeamIndus
The current design of the rover

The rover is named ECA (pronounced eeka), which expands in Hindi to Ek Choti si Aasha, or “One Small Wish.” It weighs 7 kilograms with wheels made of high-strength aluminium. The rover’s body will be made of carbon fiber and aluminium, while the lander is comprised of aluminium and aluminium honeycomb sandwich composite panels. Both spacecraft will power themselves with solar panels, but will be perennially exposed to the sun.

ECA will move on the lunar surface at a speed of 6 centimeters per second, with a maximum speed of 10 centimeters per second. It will use an autonomous onboard navigation system, and come equipped with temperature and inertial sensors, a low-resolution camera for mapping terrain, and two high-resolution micro-cameras (called CASPEX or Colour cmos cAmera for SPace EXploration) for spotting obstacles in the rover’s path. The two state-of-the-art cameras are provided by CNES, the French national space agency. CNES has supplied cameras for other space missions in the past, including the Curiosity rover.

Out of the 13 teams still in the competition, four others have announced their launch contracts. SpaceIL is from Israel and has a contract with SpaceX (Given the recent unfortunate incident with the Falcon 9, SpaceIL’s launch could be delayed). Moon Express, a space startup owned by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, have a contract with RocketLab. SynergyMoon, an international collaboration, has a launch contract with Interorbital Systems. The German team, PT Scientists, announced their launch contract with Spaceflight Industries two days ago, although this is yet to be verified by GLXP. The last date to announce a launch contract is Dec 31st of this year.

TeamIndus is owned by the parent company Axiom Research Labs, which was founded for the purpose of this mission by five former IT employees: Rahul Narayan, Indranil Chakraborty, Sameer Joshi, Dilip Chabria and Julius Amrit. The group also has advisors who have worked with ISRO. They are headquartered in Bangalore, India.

 

[Indx TechStyle]

Indus Team from India may win $30 million Google Lunar X prize
By Dileep Thekkethil | December 2, 2016

Only private team from India.

Team Indus

When Rahul Narayan started a software startup back in 2010, he never thought his ideas would perhaps end up on the moon.

Narayan’s company was involved in developing products for e-commerce companies, but when Google announced the Google Lunar X-Prize completion, Narayan was genuinely interested and now, the progress he made in creating a rover that can move on the lunar surface, makes him the frontrunner in winning the prize.

Google Lunar X-Prize competition announced in 2007 invited companies to build a rover that can move at least 500 meters on the lunar surface and send high-resolution images and videos of earth’s satellite.

Narayan’s team “Indus” is the only private company to represent India in the Google Lunar X-Prize completion which has 16 teams competing for a chance to go to the moon and win the $30 million prize.

Team Indus has won one Milestone Prize: the Landing Prize, for a total of $1 million in prize winnings and is all set to land the rover on moon next year.

According to the official website of Google Lunar X-Prize, “Team Indus’ Mission is a celebration of all things great about India – the audacious goal, the young bright engineers, the can-do entrepreneurial spirit, partners who commit their resources, and the new breed of world-class entrepreneurs who have supported our mission – all of whom are united by a vision to deliver a best-in-class technology outcome entirely out of India.”

In a milestone achievement that no other competing teams have achieved, Team Indus has successfully convinced the ISRO to launch a rocket carrying its rover to Moon in December 2017, thus becoming the first private company to get a dedicated rocket built by ISRO.

Going by the rules of theGoogle Lunar X-Prize, the teams should privately fund 90% of the mission cost and have to secure the contract of a space agency before the end of 2016. The launch must happen in 2017.

The operation needs to be 90 percent privately funded, and the launch contract needs to be secured with a space agency before 2016.

Prototype of the moon rover.

Team Indus has been working with the Indian space organization since 2014 and they have been working on the project since 2012. If things work as planned, the rover will blast off in a PSLV rocket on December 28, 2017, and will land on the lunar surface on January 28, 2018.

“What gave us confidence to dream big when we started on this journey many years back was the heft of the scientific legacy that India, with ISRO, created over decades. This launch contract reaffirms our mission as a truly Indian mission where the best of India’s public and private enterprises have come together to realize a common dream,” said Narayan, TeamIndus’ Fleet Commander.

“As far as simulation, design, and analysis go, we’re 90 percent sure of ourselves. Touchdown can be tricky, but I’d say we’re about 75 percent sure about,” he added. “Recently European Space Agency’s mars rover crashed destroying nearly nine months of their work. We believe we have an advantage compared to the other teams because we have an indigenous ecosystem available for us thanks to ISRO.”

Team Indus designed the lunar rover as a complete “Made in India” project in order to cut the cost. Close to 100 people have worked on the project which also includes 20 retired ISRO scientists. The Indian team got funding from private firms, including that of Ratan Tata’s.

The PSLV rocket carrying the rover will lift off to an orbit 880km x 70,000 km above the earth from where the spacecraft will commence its 21 days’ travel to the moon. It will land in the north-western hemisphere of the Moon.