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NASA, ISRO to moonwalk together
Published on Tue, May 09, 2006 at 09:18, Updated on Tue, May 09, 2006 at 21:43 in 
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Bangalore: ISRO and NASA signed a Memorandum of Understanding on Tuesday on including two US scientific instruments on board India's mission to the Moon, Chandrayaan-I.
ISRO Chairman G Madhavan Nair and NASA Administrator Michael Griffin signed the MoU at the ISRO Satellite Centre in Bangalore.
The first instrument will be sent to find out whether there is any water on the Moon surface, while the second will study its mineral composition.
The two US instruments are called:
> Mini Synthetic Aperture Radar- which has been developed by Applied Physics Laboratory in Johns Hopkins University.
> Moon Minerology Napper - which is being jointly built by Brown University and Jet Propulsion Laboratory of NASA.
Both these instruments have been developed and funded by NASA.
The instruments were selected on the basis of their merit among 16 other proposals that were received in response to ISRO's announcement of the opportunity, the Indian Space Research Organisation said.
Chandrayaan-I
Chandrayaan-I, scheduled for 2007-2008, is India's first unmanned scientific mission to Moon.
It is the most ambitious mission of ISRO till date.
The spacecraft will come near 100 km above Moon surface and will carry out nine experiments - including a reconnaissance of the dark side of the Moon.
"Chandrayaan-I is essentially a scientific mission to map the Moon's geophysical features and chemical composition of its surface so as to understand its origin," the Programme Director of Chandrayaan-I said.
A facility centre is also getting built on the outskirts of Bangalore, which will be opened soon for furthering ISRO's space research programmes.
Chandrayaan-I will beam data from all its experiments to this centre.
The European Space Agency, too, has said that it will send three instruments aboard Chandrayaan-I and is keen on establishing an Indo-European space agency in the near future.
For India, Chandrayaan-I is expected to create a new landmark in the history of space research and it will open up new vistas for aeronautic operations on the lunar surface.
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