Bangalore, July 17: Playing down the concerns regarding Chandrayaan-I’s usability after a crucial onboard sensor developed a snag, ISRO chairman G Madhavan Nair said on Friday that over 95 percent of India’s first moon mission objectives have been achieved.
“In the last eight months of the operation of the mission we have collected almost 95 percent of the data that we wanted; most of its objectives have already been completed,” ISRO chairman G Madhavan Nair said.
On the trouble with the sensor, ISRO Chief said that the mission lost a vital sensor last month which was helping the mission to know its direction.
“Like in the olden days when one used to look at the stars to fix a direction, likewise onboard electronic equipment is required for precise pointing (towards the moon),” he explained.
Even though he accepted that the development had ISRO scientists worried but he was quick to point out that it will not reduce the two-year lifespan of Chandrayaan spacecraft.
“Chandrayaan can continue but of course one cannot predict….failures can always happen if some more failures happen, then we have problems,” he said, adding that the mission is a “100 percent success”.
On the backup plan, Nair said that they worked very innovatively to overcome this loss with scientists at the satellite control centre of ISRO telemetry, tracking and command network (ISTRAC) tackling the disorientation, using the antenna-pointing mechanism and gyroscope on board the spacecraft.
The space agency’s deep space network (DSN) at Byalalu, about 40 km from here, is able to receive the orientation information from the spacecraft regularly.
“As you know we did not have experience of this kind anytime earlier. This is for the first time we have understood the intricacies of going around the moon and this data will help us make the subsequent mission much more reliable,” he said.
The malfunction occurred about three weeks after Chandrayaan’s orbit was raised to 200 km from 100 km with a wider swath on May 19 for further studies on orbit perturbations and gravitational field variation of the moon.
Giving details about the problems encountered by the mission after its launch, Nair said, “Space missions are very, very complex. There are instances of problems on board. We were also not spared from these.”
He said that the craft had faced fairly hostile environment around the moon especially in terms of thermal cycling as well as radiation.
“The first thing what we encountered when it was put in the 100 km orbit, it simply reached a stage of thermal runaway. The entire spacecraft would have been baked. We would have lost it,” he said, adding that it was a scenario about a month after the launch
The mission objectives of Chandrayaan-I included surveying the lunar surface to produce a complete map of its chemical characteristics and 3-dimension topography.
–Agencies–