STUDY OF EARTH'S MOON FOR WATER-ICE WITH MINISAR ONBOARD CHANDRAYAAN

Abstract

The first artificial satellite Sputnik-1 was launched in 1957 for exploring the Earth's moon. Since then, more than 100 lunar exploratory missions (unmanned as well as manned) have been undertaken to explore the moon in greater detail. Erstwhile Soviet Union's LUNA spacecraft missions were followed -by United States RANGER and SURVEYOR missions, and ultimately the APOLLO Moon landing mission. Over a dozen astronauts have landed on the Moon and about 400kg of lunar materials have been brought to Earth. There was a lull for about twenty years when it was found that the Moon's surface was a dry place. During .1990, the pictures of Moon taken by the imaging system on board NASA's Galileo, once again renewed interest to undertake lunar missions, when it identified a large impact basin of about 2500 km in diameter and 10 to 12 km deep in the South pole Aitkin Region (SPAR) on the far side of the Moon.(Datta, 2008) The advancements in sensor, detector and miniaturization technologies have given new impetus to undertake renewed scientific interest in lunar exploration. Japanese mission, HITEN in 1990 performed a sophisticated Earth-Moon circumnavigation and was finally directed to impact on lunar far side. The joint European-American CLEMENTINE mission in 1994 was equipped with laser image detection and ranging system (LIDAR) and high resolution cameras (HIRES) which photographed nearly the whole lunar surface in ultra violet, visible, near IR and long wave IR bands from a lunar orbit of about 425 km. It provided the first global data sets for lunar gravity, topography and multi spectral imaging with about 200 m resolution. LUNAR PROSPECTOR launched in January 1998 carried remote sensing instruments, such as gamma-ray spectrometer, neutron spectrometer, alpha particle spectrometer, etc. This mission was designed to provide answers to longstanding questions about the Moon, its resources, structure and origin and provided valuable scientific data on the distribution of Thorium, Potassium, other radioactive and stable elements e.g., Fe, Ti, etc..