Lunar Exploration Will Continue With India's Chandrayaan-2 Mission

The exploration of our own moon will continue with an ambitious mission called Chandrayaan-2, a collaboration between the Indian Space Research Organization and Roscosmos, the Russian Federal Space Agency. The mission, which will be launched in 2012 or 2013, will be a follow-up to the Chandrayaan-1 mission, India’s first mission to the moon, which has provided us with excellent data about the possibility of frozen water there- see our article at this site. Whereas Chandrayaan-1 consists of a lunar orbiter, the second mission will have an orbiter and a lander (or maybe two, as we shall see in a moment) to conduct in situ investigations of the lunar surface.

It will be a landmark of cooperation between India and Russia in the area of space exploration, just one more example of the new spirit of openness and interaction between nations in this field. If you go to the website of the Indian Space Research Organization and click on “International Cooperation,” you will find a sentence that sums it all up:

“India has always recognised that space has a dimension beyond national considerations, which can only be addressed by international partners.”

Chandrayaan-2 is an excellent example of this post-Cold War attitude. But it is more than just a symbol; this mission will do good science. It will teach us some things about a body that still has a surprising number of questions associated with it: our own satellite.

Your eyebrows may have risen slightly as you read that last line. “What?” you may ask. “Don’t we already know plenty about it? After all, we’ve actually been there! We have moon rocks! What more do we need?”

Well, let’s put it this way: Imagine an alien civilization that has never visited Earth, and wants to know something about it. After great effort and expense, they finally manage to land an expedition on our planet. They hop out, knock a few golf balls around, and gather up a boxful of rocks. Then they go home, and never come back.

Now, how much do you think our hypothetical aliens could learn about our planet from that? Granted, the analogy has some rather large holes in it, since we really can learn a lot about the moon, or any body, just by observing it from afar. Due to recent technological advances, we can now gather quite a bit of information without actually going there.

But no matter how much we learn from a distance, there will always be questions that can only be answered by going there, and a boxful of rocks is only the beginning. That fundamental fact is the rationale behind further exploration of the moon.

For the time being, that exploration can be conducted by our robot probes, which will learn more about the environments of the moon and other bodies in the solar system. Human beings will follow later.

Some of the specific things that we are trying to learn about the moon relate to the ambition of putting permanent bases there, while other things simply have to do with understanding how the moon formed, and what it can tell us about the early days of the solar system. At the moment, we have some really good theories about how the moon came into being. The bad thing about theories is, they don’t mean diddly without some evidence to back them up. Now that we have the theories, we’re trying to get the evidence.

The leading theory about how the moon came into being is that early in the lifetime of our planet, it was struck by a body roughly the size of Mars. (Luckily, there was nothing living here at the time- this was so long ago, even dinosaurs were science fiction.) The resulting cataclysm was beyond our feeble imagining; the entire planet literally reeled from it, and an enormous amount of material was thrown up. While some of this material fell back to Earth, a large portion of it went into orbit, and eventually coalesced into a single body. That body is the moon.

(This is a great oversimplification of this theory, a full discussion of which would keep you reading for weeks. If you want more info, go to the NASA website and search for “Earth’s moon.”)

The scanty evidence that we have- that box of rocks- seems to bear this out. The moon rocks brought back in 1969 all have a lower percentage of iron than Earth rocks do. This makes sense, if you think about it. Iron is one of the heavier substances that would have been thrown up by that ancient impact. In the impact scenario, you would expect the heavier substances to fall back to Earth, while the relatively light ones would achieve orbit and get incorporated into the moon. The result is a rocky body that has less iron than Earth does.

OK, so we’ve got a nice little theory, and we’ve got some evidence that seems to support it. So far, so good— but the truth is, we’ve only got that one box of rocks, and they were all collected from a single place. How do we know they’re typical? Maybe that area was anomalous, and not representative of the entire moon. Besides, the theory just tells us how the moon got started. After that happened, there was a whole process of evolution that transformed a cloud of loose particles into a spherical body. If we could collect samples from many locations all over the moon, from both the surface and from various depths below the surface, then maybe we could learn something about that process.

That box of rocks is starting to look pretty inadequate now, isn’t it? To understand this body and how it got to be like it is today, we need a whole lot more samples and a lot more work. And this stuff isn’t just abstract science. While we’re going to keep exploring the moon by unmanned means for a while yet, we are aiming for a permanent human presence there eventually. We’re talking colonies, not just outposts.

That dream is now a lot closer to reality than it once was, and part of the reason is the first of these Indian moon probes, Chandrayaan-1. As we saw in our earlier article, that spacecraft participated in observations which have shown the presence of minute amounts of water on the lunar surface. This isn’t just frozen water; the molecules are apparently being made by the action of sunlight bombarding hydrogen-rich rocks. This has enormous implications for future colonizing efforts, and the fact that Chandrayaan-1 took part in the observations that revealed it is certainly a feather in the cap of the ISRO. The second probe, Chandrayaan-2, will expand on this knowledge by putting down a lander and collecting some samples. This will be the beginning of the in-depth investigation into the composition and evolution of the moon.

In discussing this mission, it should be noted that things are still in the planning stage, and details are not firm yet. If you go to the ISRO website, you will find several pages relating to this mission, and they all give different projected launch times, ranging from 2011 to 2013. Besides this, the exact equipment to be included in this mission also seems to be uncertain, with some pages saying that there will be one rover, provided by Roscosmos, and other pages saying that there will also be an Indian mini-rover. In some places, the lander/rover are spoken of as if they will be a single unit, while other places talk of them as separate pieces of equipment. When we start looking at projects that are as much as three years away, it’s not surprising that the details are a bit hazy yet. We’ll have to wait a while to get more definite and specific information.

However, there are a few points that are certain. Chandrayaan-2 will be launched from India’s Sriharikota launch facility aboard a Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV). While this is primarily an Indian and Russian collaboration, there will be some instruments provided by NASA and the European Space Agency. Once the orbiter is in orbit around the moon, the lander will detach and land near one of the lunar poles. The rover (at least the larger one) will be designed by Roscosmos, and will be powered by solar panels, possibly augmented by a nuclear power source. The lifetime of this rover will be variable; while some web pages give the projected lifetime as only a month, others say that it may be extended for as much as a year. As with other details of this mission, this one is still uncertain.

Even if the rover is only roving for a short time, it will be able to cover a lot of distance. It has a maximum speed of 360 mph (rough terrain will decrease this, of course) and should be able to visit several different locations, so that a wide variety of dust and rock samples can be collected.

This is a good mission; it will provide us with the kind of basic scientific information that is absolutely necessary for an eventual human presence on the moon. It may also help us to understand how the moon formed in the first place, which relates to the bigger questions of solar research: how did the solar system get here, and what was the process that made it?

The moon landing in 1969 was more a matter of national prestige than a scientific mission: we went to beat the Soviets. This whole mindset, while it may have had some relevance in that long-ago time, seems quaint and silly to us now. When people go to the moon again, it will be for a better reason. That line from the ISRO site said it right- this really is bigger than any single nation. These efforts are for the whole planet, and the whole human race.

Sources:

News October 22, 2008: “Russia and India Start Preparation of the Second Lunar Spacecraft” at the website of Russian Federal Space Agency: federalspace.ru/main.php?id=2&nid=4536&hl=chandrayaan-2

News January 24, 2009: “Exclusive Interview of Anatoly Perminov, Roscosmos Head, for Rossiiskaya Gazeta” at the website of Russian Federal Space Agency: federalspace.ru/main.php?id=2&nid=5263&hl=chandrayaan-2

Press Release November 14, 2007: “India and Russia Sign an Agreement on Chandrayaan-2″ at the website of Indian Space Research Organization: isro.org/pressrelease/scripts/pressreleasein.aspx?Nov14_2007

About ISRO: “Future Programme- Forthcoming Satellites” at the website of Indian Space Research Organization: isro.org/scripts/futureprogramme.aspx?Search=chandrayaan-2

“International Cooperations” at the website of Indian Space Research Organization: isro.org/scripts/internationalcooperations.aspx?Search=chandrayaan-2

Chandrayaan-2 entry at Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandrayaan-2

“Chandrayaan: Lunar Mission by Indian Space Research Organization:” chandrayaan-i.com/index.php/chandrayaan-2.html