There are five payloads – two aboard the Pragyan rover and three aboard the Vikram lander.
New Delhi
For the present, focus of Chandrayaan-3, India’s third lunar mission is on collecting as much data as possible, so all those eagerly looking forward for findings, from the unexplored South Polar region of the moon, will have to wait a bit longer, aspecial report by Shubhadeep Choudhury in The Tribune, Chandigarh, says
There are five payloads – two aboard the Pragyan rover and three aboard the Vikram lander.
Anil Bhardwaj, Director of the Ahmedabad-based Physical Research Laboratory (PRL), said analysis of data sent by the instruments “would take a while”.
Bhardwaj said with the mission life of the rover and lander being 14 days only, the time would be entirely spent on collection of scientific data.
The data collected is being sent to the Mission Control Centre in Bengaluru using the Deep Space Network of ISRO at Byalalu.
The PRL Director said the Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer (APXS) and the Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscope, two instruments aboard Pragyan, would help in investigation with regard to amount of water that could be present in the shadowy craters of the lunar south pole.
The PRL, affiliated to the Department of Space, developed the APXS. It also developed Chandra’s Surface Thermo-Physical Experiment (ChaSTE) in collaboration with Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, Thiruvananthapuram.
Bhardwaj said since lunar soil was “thermally insulated”, it had remained a mystery how heat travelled in the layers underneath the surface of the moon. ChaSTE will try to unearth this mystery, he said.
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