Spaceship to the Moon: This One's from India

There's a 'race to the moon' again: this time in Asia:

"India Launches Moon Mission in Asian Space Race"
Space.com (October 21, 2008)

"NEW DELHI (AP) — Scientists have better maps of distant Mars than the moon where astronauts have walked. But India hopes to change that with its first lunar mission.

"Chandrayaan-1 — which means "Moon Craft" in ancient Sanskrit — launched from the Sriharikota space center in southern India early Wednesday morning (Local Time) in a two-year mission aimed at laying the groundwork for further Indian space expeditions.

"Chief among the mission's goals is mapping not only the surface of the moon, but what lies beneath. India joined what's shaping up as a 21st century space race with Chinese and Japanese crafts already in orbit around the moon....

"Lunar mission blasts off"
The Strait Times (Singapore) (October 22, 2008)

"SRIHARIKOTA (India) - INDIA on Wednesday successfully launched its first lunar mission in a major boost for the country's space programme.

"There were cheers in mission control as the unmanned lunar orbiting spacecraft Chandrayaan-1 was launched with an Indian-built rocket from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota on the southeastern coast...."

Getting a spaceship to the moon is a pretty big deal. Five organizations have sent missions to Earth's only natural satellite so far: the United States, Russia, the European Space Agency, Japan and China. If all goes well with Chandrayaan-1, India will make it six.

And, for those who like an international flavor, six of Chandrayan-1's 11 payloads come from other countries. Including, apparently, some mapping equipment from the USA.

1. Terrain Mapping Camera (TMC): Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO)
2. Hyper Spectral Imager (HySI): ISRO
3. Lunar Laser Ranging Instrument (LLRI): ISRO
4. High Energy X-ray Spectrometer (HEX): ISRO
5. Moon Impact Probe (MIP): ISRO
6. Chandrayaan-1 X-ray Spectrometer (C1XS): European Space Agency (ESA) with collaboration between Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, UK and ISRO Satellite Centre, ISRO
7. Near-IR Spectrometer (SIR-2): Max-Plank-Institute for Solar System Science, through the Max-Plank Society, Germany and ESA
8. Sub Kev Atom reflecting Analyser (SARA): ESA, in collaboration with Swedish Institute of Space Physics, Sweden and Space Physics Laboratory, Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, ISRO
9. Radiation Dose Monitor Experiment (RADOM): Bulgarian Academy of Sciences
10. Miniature Synthetic Aperture Radar (MiniSAR): USA through NASA
11. Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3): Brown University and Jet Propulsion Laboratory, USA through NASA

(More about the Chandrayan-1 payloads at "Chandrayaan to carry 11 payloads" (ITExaminer.com (October 14, 2008)).

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Chandrayan? Chandrayaan? The first spelling is used in most of the articles I read, the second in the ITExaminer.com. This is the sort of thing that happens when words from one language - and writing system - are dropped into another. I'm using the first for what I write in this post, and leaving the 'double a' version in the ITExaminer.com article.