Chandrayan to explore resources on Moon

Indian Space Research Organisation’s ambitious project ‘Chandrayan’ is not a project aimed at just landing an Indian on the moon but to explore the vast mineral resources and ambundant energy potential the earth’s natural satellite had to offer, ISRO Satellite Centre Director K N Shankara has said.

''We are aiming to make ‘Chandrayan-I’ mission a success in the next 20 years and this was being done not to just take a man to land on the Moon but to explore and exploit in future, the huge mineral wealth and future needs of energy,'' he said delivering the Dr H Narasimhaiah memorial lecture titled ‘Innovative Space Technologies and Applications’, at Bangalore Science Forum on Friday.

He said the planetary mission launched by the country would explore the mineral wealth and energy sources, like Helium-3, which had the potential of solving future energy demands of the world.

Dr Shankara said the Chandrayan-I would see the Indian satellite orbiting 100 km above the moon and its terrain mapping stereo camera, with a high resolution of ten metres, explore the surface of the moon. A Deep Space tracking station was coming up near Bangalore to track the satellite, he added.

He said the time had come to adopt ‘space as a solution’ for future needs energy and drinking water. The gap between the energy needs of the world and the production was increasing and ‘power from space’, which was earlier thought economically not viable, was now increasingly believed by the scientific community as achievable, he added.

He said the energy source on earth would not be enough to meet the need of growing population and the economies. 80 per cent of energy was being produced from fast depleting fossil fuel that had led to serious environmental problems. With the demand rising every day, the annual demand of energy in the world had risen to 12 terra watts per annum. The energy shortfall would mount to 15 terra watts by the end of the century and new sources of clean energy to fill the gap had to be explored seriously. As present system of technology would not address the energy demand in the coming decades, alternative sources had to be explored.

In India the energy shortage had already assumed serious proportions hence ISRO had launched plans to explore alternative energy sources.

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