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Chandrayaan-1 is sole moon craft in space - India - The Times of India





Chandrayaan-1 is sole moon craft in space
12 Jun 2009, 0500 hrs IST, Srinivas Laxman, T


MUMBAI: Chandrayaan-1 has become the only space craft orbiting the moon after the mission by Japan ended on Wednesday night.
India attained
the unique status at 11.55 pm when Japanese mooncraft Kaguya crashed on the southern side of the moon. Kaguya had carried out lunar observations for 17 months since its launch on September 14, 2007.

Chinese lunar craft Chang'e-1, which was launched on October 24, 2007, had crashed on March 2 ending its mission. Chandrayaan-1 was launched on October 22, 2008.

Isro officials said on Thursday that India rocketed into this ununsual position following the crash of Kaguya. "With the Chinese and Japanese moon missions having ended, Chandrayaan—1 is now the only operational spacecraft orbiting the moon,'' said a senior Isro official.

The unique status of Chandrayaan—1 will end on June 21 when Nasa's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, slated for lift—off on June 17, enters the lunar orbit.

The Isro official said Chandrayaan—1's Sara payload, which is one of the six foreign instruments on board the mooncraft, would be studying the impact of Kaguya's crash and the debris and dust it threw up.

Sara — an acronym for Sub Kev Atom Reflecting Analyser — is a joint project of the Swedish Institute of Space Physics and Isro's Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre at Thiruvanathanapuram. The use of Sara for analysing data following the crash of Kaguya is considered significant because the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (Jaxa) has also contributed towards its development. Among the functions of Sara are imaging the moon's surface composition, studying solar wind surface interaction and analysing space weather.

The launch of Nasa's lunar orbiter is important to India because data will be shared and compared with information so far gathered from Chandrayaan-1 mission.

Nasa spokesperson Ashley Edwards told TOI that there are two related radar
instruments on the two missions —— Mini Sar on Chandrayaan-1 and Mini-RF on the lunar orbiter. "We expect that the Mini-RF team will target some of the locations on the moon's surface that have been imaged by Mini-Sar. This will enable comparision of instruments' performance and support common calibration conditions,'' Edwards said.

Edwards explained that in addition to these efforts the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) on board the lunar orbiter would use data from Mini-Sar on Chandrayaan-1 to assess the surface roughness of potential impact target locations. "The LCROSS targeting team will also benefit from being aware of any potential indications of water ice identified by Chandrayaan's Mini-Sar,'' he added.
 

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Photos of total solar eclipse sent by India's moon probe, Chandrayaan-I

















---------- Post added at 12:03 PM ---------- Previous post was at 12:02 PM ----------


Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Bangalore (IANS): India's first lunar mission Chandrayaan-1 has captured the shadow of the moon on the earth's surface during the July 22 total solar eclipse, an Indian space agency official said on Tuesday.

The images were captured by the special terrain mapping camera (TMC) on board the spacecraft.

"Chandrayaan tracked the movement of shadow of the moon on the earth's surface during the total solar eclipse. The high resolution images shot by the TMC from 7.45 am shows the moon's shadow spreading from north-eastern China to northern parts of Australia," Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) Director S. Satish told IANS here.

The dark shadow of the umbra region can be clearly seen in the series of images the space agency has released after they were received at ISRO's deep space network (DSN) at Baylalu, about 40 km from this tech hub.

"The digital images were processed and scanned at our space applications centre in Ahmedabad and telemetry, tracking and command network (Istrac) in Bangalore. The capturing of the celestial event confirms that the spacecraft is satisfactorily orbiting the moon at 200 km with all its payloads," Mr. Satish said.

The nine-month-old mooncraft suffered a setback in April-May when its star sensor malfunctioned and it lost orientation due to excessive radiation of the sun when it was orbiting at 100 km above the lunar surface.

ISRO scientists overcame the disorientation by using antenna-pointing mechanism and gyroscope on board the spacecraft, which is orbiting around the moon at a height of 200 km.

The Hindu News Update Service
 

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ISRO terminates the Moon Mission Chandrayaan-1

India Ends Lunar Mission After Losing Probe Signal
India Ends Lunar Mission After Losing Probe Signal (Update1) - Bloomberg.com
Aug. 31 (Bloomberg) -- India’s space agency ended an $82 million mission to map the surface of the moon after failing to restore contact with its unmanned Chandrayaan I craft.

Contact was lost with the probe two days ago and scientists at the Indian Space Research Organisation were unable to restore communications, state-run broadcaster Doordarshan reported on its Web site. The craft began orbiting the moon last November.

“We had to terminate the mission,” the broadcaster cited ISRO chief Madhavan Nair as saying yesterday. “We survived for 315 days which is a good record. Many such experiments have burnt within a month in the past.”

Chandrayaan I, or “Moon Craft,” was launched on Oct. 22 last year to map the lunar terrain as a first step toward landing an unmanned rover there by 2012. The moon is again the focus of international exploration 40 years after American Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on its surface, with the U.S., China, South Korea and Russia planning manned or unmanned missions in coming years.

A malfunction in computers on board the spacecraft led to the failure in communications, which will be probed by a committee of scientists, Doordarshan cited Nair as saying.

“We are disappointed with the development, but have managed to get a large volume of data,” including 70,000 images of the moon, Nair told reporters.

Lunar Surface

The craft was designed to orbit the moon for two years at an altitude of 100 kilometers (62 miles). It will take 1,000 days to hit the lunar surface and is being tracked by the U.S. and Russia, according to the report.

The Chandrayaan I is carrying 11 payloads, including a terrain-mapping camera developed by India designed to prepare a three-dimensional atlas of the moon.

It is also carrying mapping instruments for the European Space Agency, radiation-measuring equipment for the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and two devices for NASA to assess mineral composition and look for ice deposits.

India launched its first rocket in 1963 and first satellite in 1975. The country’s satellite program is one of the largest communication systems in the world. The next step in the lunar mission, the Chandrayaan II, which aims to land an unmanned rover on the moon’s surface to prospect for chemicals, won’t be delayed, Doordarshan cited Nair as saying.

Japan, China

Japan launched its first lunar explorer, Kaguya, in September 2007 and landed a probe on the moon’s surface in June this year. China is scheduled to land a rover to retrieve soil and rock samples in 2012 and, like the U.S., plans to send astronauts there by 2020. Russia aims to follow with a manned mission five years later.

South Korea intends to send a probe to orbit the moon by 2020, according to the Korea Aerospace Research Institute. The nation carried out its first space rocket launch last week in an unsuccessful attempt to put a satellite into orbit. The satellite probably burned up in the atmosphere after falling back to Earth, according to the government.
I had lot more expectations on Chandrayaan-1. I thought It would last atleast an year when star sensors failed, during the launch i thought it would easily last till 2011 or even untill Chandrayaan-2 arrives by orbiting at higher altitudes which would require less fuel to correct its position.

But the question i always had is
Did ISRO try too much with too less?

not only Chandrayaan-1 was lighter than Japanese & Chinese lunar crafts, almost half the weight n size of chinese craft but carried double the number of instruments including the impact probe. It also orbited at much lower altitudes (100km) which required more corrections. and on the top of all this, It was the cheapest moon mission in the 21st century.

I always suspected that packing too many instruments into a such a small satellite might have the overheating problems that was reported initially and it also forced ISRO to switch off some instruments.

neverthless this was the first attempt, so unforeseen problems. I hope Chandrayaan-2 will be better in solving these problems and also the fact thats its more challenging as it has a lander.
 

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I'll take Mr.Nair's word that most of the objectives have been achieved and frankly $80 million dollars for becoming the fifth country to reach the lunar surface doesn't seem like a bad deal.But i feel they should have taken more adequate measure to cool the equipment t and installed better heat shielding.
Let's hope Chandrayaan 2 fares better. Another learning curve for ISRO.
 

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01 September 2009


The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) has selected ISRO's Chandrayaan-1 mission as one of the recipient's of its annual, AIAA SPACE 2009, awards, which recognize key contributions to space science and technology.

The awards will be presented on 16 September as part of the AIAA SPACE 2009 Conference & Exposition, 14 September, at the Pasadena Convention Center, Pasadena, California.

The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) is a professional society for the field of aerospace engineering and was founded in 1963 from the merger of two earlier societies: the American Rocket Society (ARS), founded in 1930 as the American Interplanetary Society (AIS), and the Institute of Aerospace Sciences (IAS), founded in 1932 as the Institute of Aeronautical Sciences.

The AIAA is the US representative on the International Astronautical Federation and the International Council on the Aeronautical Sciences.

As of 2004, the AIAA has more than 35,000 members and despite its name, it has members among aerospace professionals worldwide.

A release from the institute said the Chandrayaan-1 mission, India Space Research Organization (ISRO), Bangalore, India, will receive the AIAA 2009 Space Systems Award.

http://www.domain-b.com/aero/aero_general/20090901_chandrayaan1.html
 

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Hope Russia & Amrikans are tracking Chandrayaan. ISRO is saying craft would take 1000 days to hit moons surface.
 

RPK

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Chandrayaan-1 successful but could have achieved more: Pieters - dnaindia.com

Panaji: Chandrayaan-1 was a successful mission though it could have achieved more had it lasted its full term of two years, a senior US-based scientist said today.

"We have reached the level of having our initial overview completed. What we have not achieved is our ultimate goal, which was a much more extended mission that was to be achieved during the full 2 years," Carle Pieters, science manager at NASA supported spectrology facility at Brown university in USA, told reporters here.

She was commenting on the success of India's first moon mission, on the sidelines of an international conference on low cost planetary missions in Panaji.

Pieters, a NASA-collaborator associated with Chandrayaan's moon mineralogy mapper, said that scientists had accomplished what they wanted to in the first phase. We will be working with the data in the future, she said.

"The achievements are very difficult to accomplish. We are very happy to be a part of this adventure," Pieters said. Asked her opinion on Indian Space Research Organisation chief Dr G Madhavan Nair's claims of 95 per cent success, Pieters said that she would not be able to comment much as she had information only on the experiment she was associated with
 

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Chandrayaan finds water on Moon's surface

NEW DELHI: India’s maiden Moon mission Chandrayaan-1 has found water on the lunar surface before the project was aborted. Credit for this much-awaited discovery goes to Nasa's Moon Minerology Mapper (M3), one of the payloads on board Chandrayaan. The Rs 386-crore craft was launched on October 22 last year and terminated on August 30 following a communication failure. One of the mission’s main goals was to sniff for water.

Earlier, neither ISRO nor NASA spoke about the discovery. A spokesman for Brown University had also declined comment, saying there was an embargo. "It will be a major announcement of a major discovery and is something great for Chandrayaan. It will mark a major leap for India’s space programme," he had said. An Isro official at Sriharikota has also confirmed that a major announcement was expected on Thursday. "I too have heard something to that effect. Nothing more," he said. The announcement could now trigger another round of Moon missions, and start serious hunt for life in outer space. India has not ruled out the possibility of a manned lunar flight.

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LONDON (Reuters) - Chandrayaan-1, India's first lunar mission, has found evidence of large quantities of water on its surface, The Times newspaper reported on Thursday. Data from the spacecraft also suggests water is still being formed on the moon, the British newspaper said. "It's very satisfying," the newspaper quoted Mylswamy Annadurai, the mission's project director at the Indian Space Research Organisation in Bangalore, as saying. The newspaper said the breakthrough would be announced by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration on Thursday.

NASA's website says it will hold a media briefing at 1440 EDT on Sept. 24 to "reveal new scientific findings about the moon" from data collected during national and international space missions. The unmanned Indian craft was equipped with NASA's Moon Mineralogy Mapper.
(Reporting by Daniel Fineren)

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Chandrayaan is third Spacecraft to detect water on Moon using light wavelenth after Cassini and Deep Impact.

It's not lunacy, probes find water in moon dirt
The Associated Press: It's not lunacy, probes find water in moon dirt
Three different space probes found the chemical signature of water all over the moon's surface, surprising the scientists who at first doubted the unexpected measurement until it was confirmed independently and repeatedly.

It's not enough moisture to foster homegrown life on the moon. But if processed in mass quantities, it might provide resources — drinking water and rocket fuel — for future moon-dwellers, scientists say. The water comes and goes during the lunar day.

It's not a lot of water. If you took a two-liter soda bottle of lunar dirt, there would probably be a medicine dropperful of water in it, said University of Maryland astronomer Jessica Sunshine, one of the scientists who discovered the water. Another way to think of it is if you want a drink of water, it would take a baseball diamond's worth of dirt, said team leader Carle Pieters of Brown University.

"It's sort of just sticking on the surface," Sunshine said. "We always think of the moon as dead and this is sort of a dynamic process that's going on."

This light wavelength was first discovered by an instrument on the Indian lunar satellite Chandrayaan-1, which stopped operating last month. Scientists initially figured something was wrong with the instrument because everyone knew the moon did not have a drop of water on the surface, Pieters said.

"We argued literally for months amongst ourselves to find out where the problem was," Pieters said. Sunshine, who was on the team, had a similar instrument on NASA's Deep Impact probe, headed for a comet but swinging by the moon in June. So Deep Impact looked for the water-hydroxyl signature — and found it.

Scientists also looked back at the records of NASA's Cassini probe, which is circling Saturn. It has the same type instrument and whizzed by the moon ten years ago. Sure enough, it had found the same thing.

The chance that three different instruments malfunctioned in the same way on three different spaceships is almost zilch, so this confirms that it's water and hydroxyl, Pieters said.

Pieters figures there are three possibilities: It came from comets or asteroids that crashed into the moon, those crashes freed up trapped water from below the surface, or the solar wind carries hydrogen atoms that binds with oxygen in the dirt. That final possibility is the one that Sunshine and Pieters both prefer.

If it is the solar wind, that also means that other places without atmosphere in our solar system, such as Mercury or asteroids, can also have bits of water, Sunshine said.
what NASA was expecting was to find ocean of water deep under the moon on those regions where light can never reach. if Chandraayan & LRO worked together then probably it could have been discovered (if it was there).
in any case would be interesting to see what the Synthetic aperture radar has discovered.
 

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Large quantities of water found on the Moon - Telegraph

Data from the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft also suggests water is still being formed on its surface.

It is believed that the water is concentrated at the poles and possibly formed by the solar wind.

The finding was made after researchers examined data from three separate missions to the moon.

The reports, to be published in the journal Science on Friday, show that the water may be moving around, forming and reforming as particles become mixed up in the dust on the surface of the moon.

Dr Mylswamy Annadurai, the mission’s project director at the Indian Space Research Organisation in Bangalore, told The Times: “It’s very satisfying.

“This was one of the main objectives of Chandrayaan-1, to find evidence of water on the Moon.”

The unmanned craft was equipped with Nasa’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper, designed specifically to search for water by picking up the electromagnetic radiation emitted by minerals.

The M3, an imaging spectrometer, was designed to search for water by detecting the electromagnetic radiation given off by different minerals on and just below the surface of the Moon.

Unlike previous lunar spectrometers, it was sensitive enough to detect the presence of small amounts of water.

M3 was one of two Nasa instruments among 11 pieces of equipment from around the world on Chandrayaan-1, which was launched into orbit around the Moon in October last year.

Carle Pieters of Brown University in Rhode Island and colleagues reviewed data from Chandrayaan-1 and found spectrographic evidence of water. The water seems thicker closer to the poles, they reported.

"When we say 'water on the moon,' we are not talking about lakes, oceans or even puddles. Water on the moon means molecules of water and hydroxyl (hydrogen and oxygen) that interact with molecules of rock and dust specifically in the top millimetres of the moon's surface," Pieters said in a statement.

Scientists said the breakthrough would change the face of lunar exploration.
 

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Moon water traces finding by Chandrayaan-1 path-breaking: Nair

Bangalore, Sept 24 (PTI) Describing as "path-breaking" the evidence of water on Moon by India's Chandrayaan-1 mission, ISRO Chairman G Madhavan Nair today said no lunar odyssey so far had given a "positive" conclusion.

"There is confirmation of traces of water.It is a path-breaking event as far as Chandrayaan-1 mission is concerned. It is very very significant. So far, no mission has confirmed the presence of water positively," he told PTI.

One of the major instruments that gave the data was Moon Mineralogy Mapper of NASA, which was one of the payloads on board India's maiden Moon mission supplemented by hyper-spectral imager and moon impact probe of Indian Space Research Organisation.

The data analysis was done by scientists of Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the US and Physical Research Laboratory and Space Application Centre, both headquartered in Ahmedabad, he said.
 

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We found water on moon, courtesy ISRO: NASA​

WASHINGTON: NASA on Thursday revealed that India's maiden lunar mission Chandrayaan-I had traced water molecules on the moon's surface. It also "thanked" ISRO for making the discovery possible. “We want to thank ISRO for making the discovery possible. Moon till now was thought to be a very dry surface with lot of rocks,” NASA said in a press conference. “Discovery of moon is a major leap in our knowledge of the moon. NASA’s instruments helped finding the water molecules in collaboration with ISRO,” NASA said. Instruments aboard three separate spacecrafts, one of them the Moon Mineralogy Mapper, a NASA instrument onboard Chandrayaan-I revealed water molecules in amounts that are greater than predicted, but still relatively small, it added. "Water ice on the moon has been something of a holy grail for lunar scientists for a very long time," said Jim Green, director of the Planetary Science Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "This surprising finding has come about through the ingenuity, perseverance and international cooperation between NASA and the India Space Research Organisation," he said.

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Such a major discovery. DFI should celebrate Chandrayaan-1 every-year remembering its importance, discoveries, achievement just like we celebrate different festivals.

Congrats to ISRO.
 

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Such a major discovery. DFI should celebrate Chandrayaan-1 every-year remembering its importance, discoveries, achievement just like we celebrate different festivals.

Congrats to ISRO.

Then DFI is going to celebrate each and everyday for something as this is just a begining for India.
 

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India’s own probe also found water on moon: ISRO

Bangalore, Sep 25 (IANS) India’s own Moon Impact Probe (MIP) on board the country’s maiden lunar craft had discovered water on the moon, a finding confirmed by US space agency NASA’s probe that was also aboard Chandrayaan-1, India’s top space scientist G. Madhavan Nair said here Friday.
India’s first lunar mission had made a “path-breaking and real discovery” by establishing the presence of water on the moon, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) chairman Nair said.

While expressing pride in the achievement, Nair added: “But the water is not in the form of sea or lake or puddle or drops. It is embedded on the surface in minerals and rocks.”

Apart from India’s MIP, the Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) of NASA on board Chandrayaan-1 confirmed the presence of water. The lunar mission had to be aborted Aug 30 after it lost radio contact with Earth.

According to Nair, the “quantity found is much larger than expected”.

On whether water can be extracted, Nair said: “Yes, we can. But one tonne of soil may yield half a litre.”

Nair said MIP picked up signals about the presence of water as it journeyed down to land on the moon surface.

“One of the main objectives of Chandrayaan-1 was to look for the presence of water. Our MIP confirmed it.”

He said they had indications of the finding “way back in June”, but waited all these days to make it public as they wanted the findings to come out in a scientific journal first.

“The volume of data collected from Chandrayaan-1 is phenomenal. It may take six months to three years to analyse it.”
 

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One big step for India, a giant leap for mankind - India - NEWS - The Times of India

BANGALORE/MUMBAI: It is a giant leap for India's space programme and the biggest scientific discovery of the 21st Century. India's maiden moon
mission, Chandrayaan-1 has found water, a discovery that scientists say will upend thinking about space and boost research. And, of course, it has helped shake off the failure tag from the Rs 386-crore Chandrayaan-I project that was aborted last month.

The historic development, that TOI in a global newsbreak reported in Wednesday's edition, took place just prior to the termination of the mission on August 30, 2009. Although water was spotted by the Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3), a NASA probe and one of the 11 payloads on the spacecraft, glory shone on ISRO for the discovery that was made after nearly five decades of lunar exploration by Western nations.

``If it weren't for them (ISRO), we wouldn't have been able to make this discovery,'' Carle Pieters, the Brown University researcher who analyzed the data from the NASA probe.

Pieters, a planetary geologist, has told scientists the discovery ``opens a whole new avenue of lunar research but that we have to understand the physics of it to utilize it''. A Brown University statement on Thursday said, ``The discovery by M3 promises to reinvigorate studies of the moon and potentially upend thinking of how it originated.''
Water molecules (H20) and hydroxyl ^ a charged molecule consisting of one oxygen atom and one hydrogen atom ^ were discovered across the surface of the Moon. The M3 had covered almost 97% of the Moon before Chandrayaan-1 was terminated.

Brown University scientists say that while the abundance is not precisely known, ``as much as 1,000 water molecule parts-per-million could be in the lunar soil: harvesting one tonne of the top layer of the Moon's surface would yield as much as 32 ounces of water''.

ISRO chairman Madhavan Nair described it a path-breaking event and Chandrayaan-I project director Mylswamy Annadurai called it one of the greatest examples in international collaboration in space.

Chandrayaan's surprise find triggered tremendous excitement among Indian space scientists who were disappointed that the mission had to be terminated because of a communication breakdown.

Narendra Bhandari, who is associated with Chandrayaan, told TOI from Ahmedabad: ``It is a good observation and after all it was one of the main aims of the Indian Moon programme. According to well-known astrophysicist, S M Chitre, water on the Moon could have been deposited by the comets several billion years ago. ``The comets are like water carriers,'' he told TOI.

Regarding the significance of the discovery, Chitre said that it will have far reaching consequences with regard to the human colonization of the Moon and future rocket launches from the lunar surface. ``The real significance of this mission is that it surveyed the entire moon. Nasa's Apollo manned missions between 1969 and 1972 did not find any water at all because they surveyed only a bare 25% of the lunar surface,'' he said.

President of National Space Society (NSS), Suresh Naik, told TOI finding water will help in making rocket fuel.

``Launching rockets from the Moon definitely have an advantage because the escape velocity is much less than on Earth,'' he said. On Earth, the escape velocity, ie, the speed a rocket needs to escape the Earth's gravity, is 11km per second. With the Moon's gravity being one-sixth that of the Earth's, the escape velocity would be much less, he explained. In plain terms, it means less energy is needed to launch rockets from the Moon.

The US, Russia and China are exploring the possibility of building human habitats on the Moon after 2020. Space experts said that in this race, India cannot lag behind and Isro officials also have not ruled this out.

Pieters said findings from M3 reveal new questions about ``where the water molecules come from and where they
may be going''. Scientists have for long speculated that water molecules may migrate from non-polar regions of the Moon to the poles, where they are stored as ice in ultra-frigid pockets of craters that never receive sunlight. If, indeed, the water molecules are mobile, there is then the possibility of getting water to the permanently shadowed craters.

She said: ``When we say water on the Moon, we are not talking about lakes, oceans or even puddles. Water on the Moon means molecules of water and hydroxyl that interact with molecules of rock and dust specifically in the top millimeters of the Moon's surface,'' she explained.

The M3 team found water molecules and hydroxyl at diverse areas of the sunlit region of the Moon's surface as well as at the Moon's higher latitudes where it seemed more definitive in presence. The M3 discovery has been confirmed by data from two NASA spacecrafts ^ the Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) ^ on the Cassini spacecraft and High-Resolution Infrared Imaging Spectrometer on the EPOXI spacecraft.

The M3 is a joint project of Nasa's Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and Brown University.
 

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Such a major discovery. DFI should celebrate Chandrayaan-1 every-year remembering its importance, discoveries, achievement just like we celebrate different festivals.

Congrats to ISRO.
Actually ISRO creates history. Its one of the major space exploration after first satellite, first man in space and first man on Moon. Congrats to ISRO and NASA.

NASA - NASA Instruments Reveal Water Molecules on Lunar Surface

"Water ice on the moon has been something of a holy grail for lunar scientists for a very long time," said Jim Green, director of the Planetary Science Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "This surprising finding has come about through the ingenuity, perseverance and international cooperation between NASA and the India Space Research Organization."


NASA - Signatures of water



:india:
 

RPK

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BBC NEWS | South Asia | India hails Moon mission 'find'


India's inaugural Moon mission has been hailed as a "grand success" by the head of India's space agency, after helping find evidence of water on the Moon.

Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) chief G Madhavan Nair said a spacecraft probe found more water on the Moon "than was expected."

The mission was terminated last month after communication was lost with the orbiting spacecraft.

The craft was launched last October for a two-year mission of exploration.

Data from three spacecraft, including India's Chandrayaan probe, has shown that very fine films of H2O coat the particles that make up the lunar dirt, US space agency Nasa announced.

The quantity is tiny but could become a useful resource for astronauts wishing to live on the Moon, scientists say.

"We truly believe it is a path-breaking finding. But this is just the beginning," Mr Nair said.

"Indians should be proud of the fact that the Chandrayaan enabled the discovery of water on the Moon," he said.

Indian scientists have welcomed the discovery and said more studies needed to be done to find out how much water was available and whether it was fit for human consumption.

'Significant'

"The results suggest that frost rather than water is present in the form of a thin film on the lunar surface. The quantity and its distribution across the Moon is still an open question," K Kasturirangan, a former chief of Isro told the Press Trust of India press agency.

"Ultimately, in the long run if humankind has to go and inhabit the Moon, one of the important requirements is that you should have adequate water for survival," he said.

An Indian scientist working in Nasa said it was a "significant discovery"

"It is a very significant finding if we ever are to venture out to set up a base anywhere in the solar system, the Moon is the nearest destination," Amitabha Ghosh said.

The Indian media has also hailed the role of Chandrayaan in the finding.

One Big Step for India, A Giant Leap for Mankind, headlined The Times Of India newspaper.

"[The finding] has helped shake off the failure tag from the Chandrayaan project that was aborted last month," the paper said.

The mission was expected to cost 3.8bn rupees (£45m; $78m), considerably less than Japanese and Chinese probes sent to the Moon last year.

But the Indian government's space efforts have not been welcomed by all.

Some critics regard the space programme as a waste of resources in a country where millions still lack basic services.
 

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Every one is hailing NASA's M3 but our own MIP and HYSI also had large contribution towards finding water on Moon.

ISRO confirms moon water, calls Chandrayaan a success

The Moon Impact Probe

The MIP while descending from Chandrayaan-I to moon, picked up strong signals of water particles, he said.

“While the moon impact probe landed, it took nearly 25 minutes. It took some pictures that indicated these water molecules. Another instrument HYS1 to map minerals also helped NASA'S M3 in finding water.”

“The water is not in form of sea, lake, or even as a puddle or not even a drop. It is embedded in the surface in the minerals found there,” he said.

Apart from India's MIP, the Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) of NASA on board Chandrayaan-I also confirmed the presence of water.

Nair explained, “However, the quantity of such molecules is much more than what we were expecting. And, yes it can extracted but the quantity would be very less. One tonne of soil will roughly yield ½ litre of water.”
 

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