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New data from moon’s poles soon: ISRO

CHENNAI: The Lunar Laser Ranging Instrument (LLRI), one of the Indian payloads on board Chandrayaan-1, has completed about 40 per cent coverage of the lunar polar region and it will soon provide new data, according to J.A. Kamalakar of Laboratory for Electro-Optics Systems, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), Bangalore.

The current status of the Chandrayaan-1 mission and the salient features of the initial results obtained by its various onboard instruments were presented on March 24 at a special session on lunar missions at the 40th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference held at Texas, U.S.

Professor J.N. Goswami, Director, Physical Research Laboratory, Ahmedabad, and also Principal Scientist, Chandrayaan-1, said more than a 1,000 delegates from across the world attended the conference. The Chandrayaan-1 team members presented a dozen papers at the session. The extensive coverage of the lunar polar region by the LLRI was presented by Dr. Kamalakar. He said the instrument provided details of the topography of lunar surface and crater bases.

(The LLRI is a laser radar that generates data on the height or depth of hills, mountains, valleys and craters on the moon). Paul Spudis, Principal Investigator of Mini Synthetic Aperture Radar (miniSAR) instrument, said data from some of the shadowed areas in the lunar polar region had been obtained. Dr. Spudis indicated that (work on obtaining) data for permanently shadowed polar regions of the moon to look for possible signatures of water-ice, mixed with upper layers of lunar soil, would be initiated soon.

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New data from moon’s poles soon: ISRO
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