British scientist looking forward to Chandrayaan launch

A British scientist is eagerly looking forward to the launch of India's first moon mission, Chandrayaan-I, for which he designed a camera that will photograph the moon's surface.

Chandrayaan is scheduled to be launched from Satish Dhawan Space Centre at Sriharikota on October 22.

"It is going to be great. It has been a lot of work but fingers crossed everything goes okay. I am busy trying to get my travel arrangements sorted out to attend the launch in India," said Manuel Grande, a professor at the Aberystwyth University in Wales, who worked on the project since helping to develop a prototype came for a European mission in 2003.

The camera on the current mission is of the size of a toaster and which will be fixed onto a shelf of the unmanned Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft.

The camera will photograph elements which may match elements on Earth, said Grandem, who is the head of Solar System Physics at the university's Institute of Mathematical and Physical Sciences.

"The surface area of the moon is about the size of Africa. What nobody knows is whether the Earth and moon were formed together," said the 53-year-old scientist.

He said that in the early solar system's history there may have been a massive collision between a planet like Mars and the Earth causing debris to collect as the moon. Gravity then pulled it into a sphere.

The camera can tell of what the moon is made of. Tests will compare these elements with those on Earth to see if they match.

"This will be new data. The moon is what the Earth used to be like. It has not changed. It is frozen in time," Grande said.