INDIA’S MOON MISSION

INDIA’S MOON MISSION: Mission of Possibilities

In a bid to emerge as a global space power India plans an ambitious lunar launch that will boost its technological capability and ignite popular imagination. But there are still many naysayers.

On many of his evening walks in Bangalore, K. Kasturirangan gets a magnificent view of a rising full moon. Surprisingly, the spirited chairman of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) admits that he rarely stops to admire the celestial spectacle. Having studied how the earth's closest astral neighbour is a dark grey, barren, crater-ridden spherical mass, he has long since shed any romantic notions about it. Of late, though, he says he does pause to stare at the moon, but more to size up the challenge that he plans to set for the nation. This week, following months of internal and external debate, Kasturirangan will put together a special team that will study the feasibility of ISRO going where no Indian has gone before: the moon.

In the next six months the team will wrestle with the details of launching such a mission, including its cost-effectiveness and the areas in which Indian scientists can significantly add to the mountain of knowledge that has already been collected about the moon. It will form the basis of a project report that ISRO will submit to the Central Government for approval. The objective: to have an Indian lunar mission sent up by 2005. "As a motivator, it will electrify the nation," Kasturirangan explained to INDIA TODAY last week. "If we go ahead, it will demonstrate to the world that India is capable of taking up a complex mission that is at the cutting edge of space.

In close to three decades of its existence, ISRO has never attempted anything as ambitious. It has so far built a dozen sophisticated satellites for communications, weather prediction and mapping natural resources. For instance, Doordarshan programmes are transmitted via INSAT channels. In rocketry, its top-of-the-line Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) can punch a satellite the size and weight of a Maruti car into an orbit 1,000 km in space. Later this year, it will test a far more powerful launcher, capable of placing a satellite into an orbit of around 36,000 km. But the moon at 3,84,467 km from the earth is still 10 times further than any distance that ISRO has attempted.

Given its current technological capability, the budgetary constraints and the time frame of five years it has set for itself, the organisation is clearly planning a modest first launch. Lunar buffs may be disappointed that India initially may not look at landing a man on the moon. What has emerged as the best option is a lunar orbiter bristling with an array of sophisticated cameras and measuring instruments that would circle the moon for several years and conduct a series of experiments.

To do this, apart from building such a hi-tech craft, ISRO would have to augment its rocketry and master the intricate and difficult task of navigating it over such a great distance and controlling it for several years. Although the moon appears like a giant football in the sky, getting a spacecraft to rendezvous with it is likened to hitting a one rupee coin placed at a distance of 25 km with a bullet from a rifle.

Yet the very nature of India's quest has already ignited fierce debate in scientific circles. Especially given that after the Soviet's Luna 2 became the first spacecraft to "impact" on its surface in 1959, the moon has been the most studied object in the solar system -- 97 per cent of its surface has already been mapped. The US stopped its man-on-the-moon programme three years after Apollo 11's historic landing in 1969. The Soviets, who were beaten in the race to the moon by the US, stopped sending orbiters to it since 1976. By then close to 382 kg of moon rock had been brought back to earth by various Apollo and Luna missions, giving scientists ample samples for research. The US and the Soviet Union then turned to exploring other planets in the solar system. Only in the '90s did interest resurface with the Japanese sending its Hiten orbiter, followed by the US-built Clementine and last year by the Lunar Prospector.

For these reasons many Indian scientists sneer at ISRO's attempt to "reinvent the wheel". Professor H.S. Mukunda, chairman, aerospace engineering department, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, says bluntly: "It is the stupidest thing to do. What others did 30 years ago, we are trying to do now. It won't bring the country any technical benefit." Mukunda instead wants ISRO to go commercial by specialising in low-cost access to space by providing the cheapest launchers in the business.

Some senior scientists also feel that the Space Department hasn't as yet fulfilled its basic objectives of collecting and transmitting accurate information about the country's resources. Data received from its remote-sensing satellites pile up unutilised though it's no fault of ISRO -- institutions to process them have still not been adequately set up. But with ISRO's limited budget, the scientists point out, it cannot afford to spend money on research and development that has no direct operational use. Instead, the money should be spent on building superior satellites.

They do have a point. Although ISRO already has six communications satellites orbiting the earth, the 80 transponders they provide form only half the projected demand. There is also a battle raging over whether building satellites should be the sole preserve of ISRO. Many private agencies feel that the space department has been too slow in perfecting its capability and either needs to speed up its act or get out of the way. They regard the moon mission as a "foolhardy" distraction.

Realising that its lunar plans were bound to raise controversy, ISRO scientists in the past year have been working quietly to build support for it. Last October, at the annual meeting of the Indian Academy of Sciences, they requested a special session and briefed the country's top scientists on their mission for three hours. Professor Narendra Kumar, director, Raman Research Institute and current president of the Indian Academy of Sciences, came out convinced that ISRO was on the right trajectory. Later he elaborated: "There is no doubt the spin-off technology is enormous. We will push our rocketry, processing systems and communications to the limits of their capability. Such a mission becomes a major point of convergence for frontier technology."

There is little doubt about the tremendous hi-tech bonanza that the Apollo and Luna missions have bes-towed on the world. Whether in the development of sophisticated error-free computers, light-weight batteries or advanced composites that strengthen tennis rackets. Moreover, the mid-'90s has seen a major renewal of interest in lunar exploration. In 1998, the Lunar Prospector made the most tantalising discovery that there is water-ice in some of the moon's craters. Though much more research has to be done to confirm the findings, it holds the possibility of humans not only colonising the moon, but also using it as a base station for future outer-space missions. Currently carting a litre of water from the earth to be used by astronauts costs close to $22,000 (Rs 9.68 lakh).

There have been other discoveries on its surface that have kindled interest, especially the presence of an abundance of helium 3 that is regarded as one of the cleanest fuels but is found in sparse quantities on the earth. With technology being developed to harness the gas to generate power, the moon holds enormous potential for earthlings. All these developments have seen several nations dusting their moon plans. Apart from the US, the European Space Agency is now planning a major expedition to the moon and has long-term plans of setting up a space station. Just as in Antarctica, everyone is suddenly eager to get a share of the pie.

Scientifically too, the moon holds many unanswered mysteries. With no atmosphere and not much geological churning going on, the moon's surface rocks are said to be 4.6 billion years old or around the age of the solar system. For researchers, it is akin to looking at the pristine state of the early universe through the lunar lens. ISRO anticipates that in the next decade or so, there would be international co-operation to speed up the exploration and exploitation of the moon's resources and would like to be part of the pack.

Perhaps the major reason that ISRO is attempting such a launch is that it is eminently do-able. Says S. Rangarajan, Satcom programme chief who will be the mission coordinator: "We already have the heritage in terms of the spacecraft needed. Now all we need to do is optimize its performance." In rocketry, for instance, there are no major modifications to be made to the PSLV. At best, its fourth-stage rocket has to be tanked up with 10 per cent more fuel, points out V. Adimurthy, group director, Aerospace Flight Dynamics at ISRO's Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSCC) in Thiruvananthapuram.

Adimurthy, a part of the feasibility team, is in charge of souping up the PSLV to meet the lunar module's long-distance journey that is expected to take five days. In a normal flight, the PSLV ejects its payload of 1 tonne within 11 minutes of lift off. But in the modified version that Adimurthy is designing, the payload, which will be a lunar orbiter, will weigh only around 350 kg. That saving in weight will allow the last-stage motor carrying the orbiter to travel at times at superfast speeds of 28,800 km per hour needed to break free of the earth's clutches and put it on course for a lunar tryst. The real challenge will come in precisely navigating the spacecraft throughout its 120-hour journey to the moon and tracking it thereafter.

The orbiter itself will be designed and built at the ISRO Satellite Centre in Bangalore. Says P.S. Goel, the centre's director who is likely to head the team: "There is nothing fundamental that we have not already done." They do need to build sophisticated instruments such as spectrometers, reflectometers and stereoscopic cameras that will collect and process an array of data from the moon's surface as the orbiter regularly goes around it and transmits the information back to earth. Lunar expert N. Bhandari, a senior professor at ISRO's Physical Research Laboratory in Ahmedabad, is chalking out a range of experiments that Indians can do including studying such curious phenomenon as unexplained levitation of dust in the airless lunar environment and also exploring the possibility of water in the moon.