India Prepares Moon Launch - Download Free Phim, Nhac, Phan Mem, Karaoke

conmeo · #1 (**permalink**) 10-21-2008, 11:54 AM

Chandrayaan-1 (which means, roughly translated, “Moon Craft-1”) was moved to the launch pad at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, India.

NEW DELHI — India was preparing to launch its first unmanned space ship to orbit the moon early Wednesday, part of an effort to assert its power in space and claim some of the business opportunities out there.

The launch of Chandrayaan-1, as the vehicle is called (it means, roughly translated, “Moon Craft-1”) comes about a year after China’s first moon mission. The Indian mission is scheduled to last for two years, prepare a three-dimensional atlas of the moon and prospect its surface for natural resources, including uranium, a coveted fuel for nuclear power plants, according to the Indian Space Research Organization.http://www.isro.org

The space craft will not land on the moon, though it will send a small “impactor” probe to the surface.

Allusions to an Asian space race could not be contained, even as Manmohan Singh, the Indian prime minister, was due for a visit to China later in the week.

“China has gone earlier, but today we are trying to catch them, catch that gap, bridge the gap,” Bhaskar Narayan, a director at the Indian space agency, told Reuters.

The maiden Indian lunar voyage will carry two devices from NASA. One, the Moon Mineralogy Mapper, or M3, will assess mineral composition of the moon from orbit. The other, the Mini-SAR, will to look for ice deposits in the moon’s polar regionswww.nasa.gov/directorates/esmd/home/griffin-india.html.

It is scheduled to be launched from a research station in Sriharikota, a barrier island off the coast of southern Andhra Pradesh state.

The moon mission, in addition to demonstrating technological capacity, can also potentially yield commercial gains for India’s space program. India’s ability to put satellites into orbit has already resulted in lucrative deals, including from Israel, which has sent up a satellite via an Indian launcher.

“It is proof of India’s technical capability in an advanced area of science,” said Dipankar Banerjee, a retired army general who heads the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies here. “India wants to be counted as one of the emerging players in Asia. Space is of course an important part of power projection.”

The mission was not without domestic critics. Bharat Karnad, a strategic affairs analyst who frequently finds fault with the Congress Party-led coalition government, called the mission a “grandiloquent” effort designed to catch up with a far more advanced Chinese space program. “It is kind of a prestige project the government has gotten into,” he argued. “This is misuse of resources that this country can ill afford at this point.”

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