ISRO agrees on EU payload for Chandrayaan

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has reached an agreement on what payload it will include from the European Space Agency (ESA) in ISRO's Chandrayaan-I lunar space mission.

ISRO had signed an agreement for including the instruments onboard India's first scientific mission to the moon, it said in a statement here on the opening day of an international conference on space law, on Monday.

This agreement, under an umbrella agreement for co-operation already existing between ISRO and ESA, was signed on Monday by G Madhavan Nair, ISRO's chairman, and Jean Jacques Dordain, director general of ESA, ISRO said.

Chandrayaan-I is planned for launch by the year 2007-08 on board an Indian Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle. The 525 kg satellite will be placed in a 100 km polar orbit around the moon and it will have a life of two years.

An important component that will go on the spacecraft, from the Indian side, is an impact probe for proving technologies required for future landing missions.

Indian and ESA scientists will share the data from the European instruments as per the agreement signed on Monday.

The European contribution will include a low energy (0.5-10 keV) X-ray spectrometer called Chandrayaan Imaging X-Ray Spectrometer from the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, UK.

It will measure the abundance of various elements, carbon for instance, distributed over the lunar surface using X-ray fluorescence technique. It will also include an X-ray solar monitor to record the incident solar X-ray flux.

There will be a near infra-red (IR) spectrometer from the Max Planck Institute of Aeronomie, Germany, to detect and measure lunar mineral abundances. Also on board will be a sub keV (kilo electron volt "" a measure of energy) atom reflecting analyser from the Swedish Institute of Space Physics, developed in collaboration with India.

This will measure volatiles generated due to solar wind impacting lunar surface and determine the surface magnetic field anomalies. Europe will also contribute to India's High Energy X-ray Spectrometer.

Indian experiments that will go on the Chandrayaan-I spacecraft include a terrain mapping camera, with stereo imaging capability, a hyper-spectral imager, a lunar laser ranging instrument with a vertical resolution of better than 5m, and a high energy X-ray (10-250 keV) spectrometer with a footprint of 20 km to detect radio nuclei.