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First private spacecraft to Moon, ISRO backs team

The rocket will carry TeamIndus' spacecraft, which carries a robotic rover inside it.

Bengaluru: India’s first private lunar mission could soon hoist the tricolour on the surface of the Moon. Space technology startup, TeamIndus, has signed a commercial launch contract with ISRO after becoming one of the four finalists of the Google Lunar XPRIZE (GLXP) competition.

TeamIndus was founded by a team of professionals including Rahul Narayan, Indranil Chakraborty, Sameer Joshi, Dilip Chabria and Julius Amrit. One of the co-founders, Dilip Chabria explained his company's quest to become India's first privately funded company to explore the 'uncharted territory' on the sidelines of CeBit event in the city. “TeamIndus is a one-way lunar mission that will take about a month to successfully complete the GLXP challenge," says Chabria. The TeamIndus campus across 45,000 square feet beside Jakkur Airfield, houses 100 engineers and two dozen retired ISRO scientists, who work towards predicting and simulating every eventuality to reduce risks during the launch of their lunar mission. "Technically, we are a customer of ISRO's marketing arm, Antrix Corporation. We have signed up for a complete dedicated launch by Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) during the last quarter of 2017. That's our primary engagement with ISRO," says Chabria.

The rocket will carry TeamIndus' spacecraft, which carries a robotic rover inside it. The lunar mission will be launched from Sriharikota range. The space craft will first be put into the low earth orbit (LEO) around the earth within an estimated time frame of 14 to 15 minutes.

"We will park the spacecraft in the LEO orbit for three days, there will be system checks. We would be in our maximum height, which is about 70,000 kilometres away from the earth. So, we need to keep increasing our orbits and get captured in the Moon's gravity field and finally land there, completing the distance of roughly 4 lakh kilometers from the earth to the Moon," says Chabria.

He hopes that the landing, which is the most crucial part of the journey would take anywhere between 12 to 18 days. After landing on the moon's surface, TeamIndus' machine is expected to survive a lunar day, which is 14 earth days or the time taken by moon to make one complete orbit around the earth. "The overall mission will take about a month," says Chabria.

When the mission lands on the dawn of the lunar day, the company hopes to deploy its rover and utilize the 12 days staying on the lunar surface to move around to explore and document it using high-end cameras.

TeamIndus is backed by the likes of Ratan Tata, Bansals and Venu Srinivasan. The company has raised about $15 million. "When the competition was announced, we realized that it didn't have a single Indian team participating, though we have the know-how and capability. So, we decided to submit our paper explaining the process, when the registration date for the Google Lunar XPRIZE was fast approaching," recalls Chabria.

Since all the earlier lunar missions have been in the government domain, the GLXP competition aims at encouraging private participation. "Once the private companies come forward, moon as a territory becomes open to more exploration. The main idea is to create innovation through competition and that's what XPRIZE does," he added.

In 2007, GLXP challenged privately funded space technology teams to successfully land a robotic spacecraft on the lunar surface which will send back high definition videos and images by December 2017.

( Source : Deccan Chronicle. )
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