Nasa map to direct Chandrayaan-2 on moon

The first ever entire map of moon’s surface being developed by the US’s National Aeronautics & Space Administration (Nasa) will show India’s second unmanned lunar mission Chandrayaan-2 the method around on moon. The map, which is being ready by Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Centre by using its lunar reconnaissance orbiter (LRO) spacecraft that is orbiting moon, will help India’s 2013 planned Chandrayaan-2 decide its precise landing point on the lunar surface, resource in the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) told DNA.

As a associate of the international lunar exploration working group, India is in line to obtain Nasa’s lunar map data when the work will be complete, for a time in 2013, in time for Chandrayaan-2 to be launched. The Chandrayaan-2 will comprise a 1,200 kg Russian intended and developed moon lander carrying a single 15 kg rover developed by Isro in collaboration with Russia. The lander will also carry a 35 kg scientific payload powered by solar panels, an equipment to analyse the lunar soil and notice the presence of water, a seismometer, a laser reflector, and will place a landing beacon to assist future moon landings.

According to them, the data being compiled will contain digital elevations and terrain maps which will act as fundamental reference for future scientific and human examination missions to the moon, beginning with Chandrayaan-2. “The data will be used by space scientists for a time of six months before being put into the free domain,” RR Navalgund, director of Ahmedabad-based Space Application Centre (SAC), told DNA. Chandrayaan-2 will pick up from where Chandrayaan-1 (October 2008-August 2009) left off after recording the discovery of water and water ice on moon, chiefly in moon’s polar region.

NASA's LRO Exposes Moon's Complex, Turbulent Youth

The moon was bombarded by two distinct populations of asteroids or comets in its youth, and its surface is more complex than previously thought, according to new results from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft featured in three papers appearing in the Sept. 17 issue of Science. In the first paper, lead author James Head of Brown University in Providence, R.I., describes results obtained from a detailed global topographic map of the moon created using LRO's Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA). "Our new LRO LOLA dataset shows that the older highland impactor population can be clearly distinguished from the younger population in the lunar 'maria' giant impact basins filled with solidified lava flows," says Head.

"The highlands have a greater density of large craters compared to smaller ones, implying that the earlier population of impactors had a proportionally greater number of large fragments than the population that characterized later lunar history." Meteorite impacts can radically alter the history of a planet. The moon, Mars, and Mercury all bear scars of ancient craters hundreds or even thousands of miles across. If Earth was subjected to this assault as well and there's no reason to assume our planet was spared these enormous impacts could have disrupted the initial origin of life. Large impacts that occurred later appear to have altered life's evolution. The approximately 110-mile-diameter, in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico, is from an impact about 65 million years ago that is now widely believed to have led or contributed to the demise of the dinosaurs and many other lifeforms.

Scientists trying to reconstruct the meteorite bombardment history of Earth face difficulty because impact craters are eroded by wind and water, or destroyed by the action of plate tectonics, the gradual movement and recycling of the Earth's crust. However, a rich record of craters is preserved on the moon, because it has only an extremely thin atmosphere – a vacuum better than those typically used for experiments in laboratories on Earth. The moon’s surface has no liquid water and no plate tectonics. The only source of significant erosion is other impacts. "The moon is thus analogous to a Rosetta stone for understanding the bombardment history of the Earth," said Head. "Like the Rosetta stone, the lunar record can be used to translate the 'hieroglyphics' of the poorly preserved impact record on Earth."