Bangalore - A US team yesterday visited an Indian Space Research Organisation facility where American equipment is being integrated into Chandrayaan-1 to look for water and ice on the moon.
The Miniature Synthetic Aperture Radar (miniSAR) will help India’s first lunar mission establish whether the permanently shadowed regions of the moon’s poles have water in any form.
The miniSAR has been developed by the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) of Johns Hopkins University, and the Naval Air Warfare Centre. The delegation was headed by Ken Ulman, the executive of Howard County in Maryland, where the APL is one of the largest private sector employers.
US space agency Nasa is expected to pay Isro at least $10 million for carrying the miniSAR and tracking its probes, officials said.
“The moon is believed to be very dry, but recent discoveries suggest the existence of water and ice in its polar regions, which are never illuminated by the sun,” a scientist said.
No comments:
Post a Comment