Apollo landing sites mapped by Chandrayaan-Pune-Cities-The Times of India
Apollo landing sites mapped by Chandrayaan
11 Jan 2009, 0256 hrs IST, Srinivas Laxman, TNN
PUNE: Nearly 40 years after Nasa's Apollo flights, which put a man on the moon, India's Chandrayaan mission launched on October 22, 2008,
recently did something unique this week it mapped the landing sites of the six Apollo missions on the moon and the process ended on Saturday.
The Apollo flights were launched between July 1969 and December 1972.
This hitherto unknown aspect of the Chandrayaan programme was revealed to TOI on Saturday by a top scientist associated with the Indian moon mission, P Sreekumar, who quit his job in the US to be a part of the Indian moon team. He was among the participants at the inauguration of the International Year of Astronomy programme at the Pune-based Inter University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCCA).
Sreekumar told TOI that that the six Apollo landing sites which were mapped related to those of Apollo 11, 12, 14 15 and 17.
The process began on January 7 and ended on January 10. "Our purpose of carrying out this exercise was to validate and confirm the data through global mapping about the moon's surface and rocks which had been obtained by these Apollo flights," he said. It may be recalled that Apollo 11 placed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon, which became historical because they were the first humans to step on the lunar surface.
He said that the mapping of the Apollo landing zones were done by six of the 11 scientific payloads on Chandrayaan which included the indigenous Terrain Mapping Camera which was first activated on
October 29, 1995, {date mistake} the Hyper Spectal Imaging Camera also from Isro, Nasa's Moon Minerology Mapper, Radom from Bulgaria and the Near Infra-Red Spectrometer (Sir-2) of Germany.
Told that the Apollo landing sites were on the equatorial region of the moon, while Chandrayaan operated in the north-south polar orbit, Sreekumar explained that even though the Indian moon mission was flying in the polar orbit, it was successfully covering the entire surface of the moon, which included the six Apollo landing sites.
He said that another instrument on Chandrayaan, the Sub-Kev Atom Reflecting Analyser (SARA), a contribution through ESA from the Swedish Institute of Space Physics, the Space Physics Laboratory and the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, Thiruvananthapuram, was activated this week. The role of this equipment is to image the moon's surface composition, including the permanently shadowed areas, study the solar wind interaction and carry out studies connected with space weathering.
