|
|
|
|
|
|
Latest News |
| 10th
February 2010 / Times of India / Bangalore Edition |
|
Scientists to create Moon in Bangalore
MARVEL OF SCIENCE
Chandrayaan-2 Soft Landing Will Be Simulated
Ahmedabad: The lunar environment is being recreated in
Bangalore as a part of the Chandrayaan-2 soft-landing
mission. Chandrayaan-1 and 2 project director Mylswamy
Annandurai said at the sixth Chandrayaan 1 scientific
meeting on Tuesday that the facility — which will
resemble the Mars yard at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion
Laboratory in Pasadena, California — will simulate
lunar soil conditions as well as the Moon’s one-sixth
gravity.
“This will help us to assess the operation of the
two rovers on the Moon,” he told TOI. At JPL’s
Mars yard the martian environment is simulated to check
the operation of rovers as a major prelaunch exercise
by Nasa.
The man behind the Indian Moon mission said planning for
this facility, whose location has yet to be identified,
has been initiated and work on it will begin soon. “We
need to plan for tomorrow today,” he said.
At the conference organised by the Physical Research Laboratory,
an autonomous body under Isro, there were clear indications
that the foreign delegates were keen that their country
and their respective space agencies should participate
in the Chandrayaan-2 mission. The Chandrayaan science
meet concluded on Tuesday.
Carle Pieters, principal investigator of the Moon Mineralogy
Mapper (M3) a payload on board Chandrayaan-1 told this
newspaper, “As an individual, I would certainly
like to participate in Chandrayaan-2 as there is still
much to do. This is, however, my opinion and not that
of Nasa’s,” she said. Regarding the choice
of instrument, she said, “This will depend upon
the orbit of Chandrayaan-2.”
K Kato of the Japanese mission to the Moon, Kaguya, said
that he had recommended that young scientists from Japan
should participate in the Chandrayaan-2 mission. “Our
next mission to the Moon will be launched in 2016 and
it will have a rover. It will execute a soft landing on
the lunar surface,” he said.
In another development, the Goa-based National Institute
of Oceanography has been analysing debris from different
asteroid belts for the past threeand-a-half years which
scientists believe could have witnessed the birth of the
solar system nearly five billion years ago, says M Shyam
Prasad, a scientist of the institute.
Prasad said that annually between 30,000 and 40,000 asteroidal
debris rain on the earth and get embedded in the deep
sea regions. “Our institute has been collecting
these particles from the deep sea portion of the Indian
Ocean region and transferring them to our labs for analysis,”
he said.
|
|
|
|
