UK to send its ‘Chandrayaan’ , MoonLITE

Britain is set to launch its maiden moon mission to study the phenomenon of mysterious moonquakes , weeks after India's spacecraft
Chandrayaan-1 successfully entered the lunar orbit. The 100-million-pound unmanned mission 'MoonLITE' would aim to understand the cause of mysterious quakes that vibrate through the lunar rock and put it into the satellite's orbit before firing a series of probes into the moon’s surface, the daily Telegraph reported on Sunday.

The report said that the launch of Moon Lightweight Interior and Telecommunications Experiment or MoonLITE, will be announced by science minister Lord Drayson next month after which engineers would work on the technical designs with an aim to launch the satellite between 2012 and 2014.

Backed by NASA, the spacecraft would also examine the chemical composition of the rocks and even search for water on the moon's surface. The existence of moonquakes has puzzled scientists as the moon does not have the tectonic plate activity that causes quakes on the earth.

Originally posted by zorgon
But how does that account for the raging dust storms that NASA is talking about?

And what about the crepuscular rays that Surveyor photographed and the Astronauts sketched?

I would say dust storms are 'volatile' and 'crepuscular rays' require a significant atmosphere...

Originally posted by wolfgang1711
... I am waiting for the Damn German instrument to get activated

The European near-infrared spectrometer SIR-2 was commissioned successfully on 19 November. The instrument was switched on and sent back housekeeping data indicating normal functionality. Science observations were started successfully on 20 November.

The Chandrayaan-1 X-ray Spectrometer, C1XS, was first activated on 23 November, and its commissioning is in progress.

The Sub-keV Atom Reflecting Analyser, SARA will be commissioned from 7 to 10 December. The commissioning for this instrument will take longer than usual because the instrument operates at a high-voltage, which will be increased in steps.

Detail-Rich: Three-dimensional images of the moon’s surface, with craters and other features, captured during the past fortnight by the Terrain Mapping Camera of Chandrayaan-1.

CHENNAI: Nine out of 11 scientific instruments on board Chandrayaan-1 have been switched on, and the data that have been radioed in by them are being analysed.

According to M. Annadurai, Project Director, Chandrayaan-1, the data include three-dimensional pictures of the Moon’s surface taken by the Terrain Mapping Camera, an instrument built by ISRO’s Space Applications Centre, Ahmedabad.

The TMC has fore, nadir and aft cameras. Of the nine instruments that have been activated, the Moon Impact Probe, painted in the colours of the Indian flag, landed on the Moon on November 14.

Two more to go


The instruments that remain to be activated are the High Energy X-ray Spectrometer (HEX) and the Sub keV Atom Reflecting Analyser (SARA). HEX, built by the Physical Research Laboratory, Bangalore and the ISRO Satellite Centre, Bangalore, will study the Moon’s polar regions for deposits of water ice and prospect areas for high uranium and thorium concentration.

SARA will investigate the surface composition, how its surface reacts to the solar wind and how materials are altered in space. SARA has been jointly built by the Swedish Institute of Space Physics and the Space Physics Laboratory of the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, Thiruvananthapuram.

HEX and SARA, both high voltage instruments, will be switched on in the first week of December. “These are high voltage systems. You have to wait for some time in orbit before they are switched on,” Mr. Annadurai said.

When the ISRO performed a series of manoeuvres by firing Chandrayaan-1’s onboard engine to take the spacecraft to the Moon and then lower it into the final lunar orbit at an altitude of 100 km above it, the two systems could have been exposed to gases.

These gases should be “evacuated’ before the two instruments were activated, he said. The calibration of instruments was under way. Teams dealing with the instruments were studying the data received. “The science data needs to be fully reviewed and analysed,” said Mr. Annadurai ....