Chandrayaan-1 payload maps iron-bearing minerals on moon

An American scientific instrument onboard India's maiden moon mission,  Chandrayaan-1, has beamed pictures of iron-bearing minerals on the lunar surface, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), said.

The moon mineralogy mapper (M3), a NASA payload onboard India's lunar mission Chandrayaan-1, reported the first finding of the iron-bearing minerals on the lunar surface, according to the US space agency.

"The mapper spectrometer has beamed images of the Orientale Basin region of the moon, indicating abundance of iron-bearing minerals such as pyroxene. Using different wavelengths of light, the instrument has also revealed for the first time changes in rock and mineral composition," M3 principal investigator Carle Pieters said in a statement on NASA website.

Space scientists can use data from the moon mapper to examine lunar mineralogy at high spatial and spectral resolution.

The Orientale Basin is located on the moon's western limb. M3 captured the data last week when Chandrayaan was orbiting the moon at an altitude of 100 km.

"The image is from a single wavelength of light that contains thermal emission, providing a new level of detail on the form and structure of the region's surface," he said.

"The M3 provides us with compositional information across the moon that we have never had access to before," Pieters said.

Added with the ability to identify and map the composition of the surface in geologic context, this provides a new level of detail needed to explore and understand the moon, he said.

"M3 will also help in characterising and mapping lunar minerals for knowing the moon's early geological evolution. Its compositional maps will improve our understanding of the early evolution of a differentiated planetary body and provide a high-resolution assessment of lunar resources," Chandrayaan project director M Annadurai said.

The moon mapper was selected as a mission of opportunity through the NASA discovery programme. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory designed and built the instrument at Pasadena in California.

M3 is one of the 10 instruments onboard the unmanned Chandrayaan, conducting experiments while the spacecraft orbits over the moon over the next two years.

Five of the instruments were indigenously built by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), while the remaining six were off foreign origin, including three from the European Space Agency, two from NASA and one from Bulgaria.