India Launches First Mission to the Moon
~ Reetu Bajaj ‘12
Diving into the international space race, India launched its first lunar mission on Wednesday, hoping to receive pictures of the topography of the moon. The lunar orbiter, named Chandrayaan-1, or “moon craft” in ancient Sanskrit, came at 6:20 a.m. Wednesday (8:50 p.m. ET) from the Sriharikota space center in southern India. According to the Indian Space Region Organization, this two year missions hopes to gain images of the moon’s surface and also to find evidence of water, ice, and lunar rocks. Even though there have been several missions to the moon over the past 50 years, “we really don’t have a good map of the moon,” said Miles O’Brien, CNN chief technology and environment correspondent. “The goal is to come up with a very intricate, three-dimensional map of the moon.” Chandrayaan-1 is carrying payloads from the United States, European Union countries Germany, Britain, Sweden and Bulgaria. India plans to distribute the data from the mission with other programs, including NASA. Other countries that have sent missions to the moon are United States, the European Space Agency, Japan, Russia, and China.