DNA Edit: Dark side of the moon – Chandrayaan-2 shows ISRO is breaking new ground

There is no praise high enough for the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), which has finally announced the date of its much-awaited Chandrayaan-2 mission to the moon. The mission will be launched on July 15, and its lander and rover will touch down on the moon’s surface either on September 5 or 6. There are two aspects of this trip. Not only will Chandrayaan-2 unravel deep mysteries of the moon, but it will also boost ties with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which is a long-term objective of ISRO. ISRO has announced that they will be using NASA’s network of deep space centres for guidance and tracking of its module. So this, by far, represents the closest NASA-ISRO joint experiment. 

The Chandrayaan-2 mission marks a milestone in an alliance that goes back a decade. In 2009, the moon’s relatively unexplored North Pole became the subject of a unique joint experiment by NASA and the ISRO in their quest to locate water-ice on the floor of its permanently shadowed craters. In that sense, Chandrayaan-2 has taken a long way coming, considering that its predecessor, Chandrayaan-1, an orbiter mission, had been sent way back in 2008. According to the original schedule, Chandrayaan-2 was to be launched in 2012, but at that time it was supposed to be a collaborative mission with the Russian space agency, Roskosmos, which was to provide the lander module. The Russians, however, withdrew from the expedition after their similarly-designed lander for another mission developed problems in 2011. 

That left ISRO to design, develop and build the lander on its own, something it has not done earlier, which has led to considerable delay when compared to the original schedule. The ISRO turned this setback into an opportunity. With Chandrayaan-2, India will become only the fourth country in the world to land a spacecraft on the moon. So far, all landings, human as well as non-human, on the moon have been in areas close to its equator. Earlier this year, in January, China landed a lander and rover on the far side of the moon, the side that is not facing the earth. This was the first time that any landing had taken place on that side. The Chinese mission was designed to function for three lunar days (three periods of two-weeks on Earth, interspersed with similar two-week periods, which is lunar night), but has outlived its mission life and entered its fifth lunar night. 

Chandrayaan-2 also reflects on ISRO’s growing global role and its international tie-ups that have propelled India into this position. Last year, in another first, under the impetus of ISRO and the French Space Agency (CNES), space agencies of more than 60 countries agreed to engage their satellites, to coordinate their methods and their data to monitor human-induced greenhouse gas emissions.  The COP21 climate conference held in Paris in December 2017, acted as a wake-up call in this context. Without satellites, the reality of global warming would not have been recognised and the subsequent historic agreement at the United Nations headquarters in New York on April 22, 2016, would not have been signed.