Chandrayaan-1 review committee happy with mission outcome

Bangalore: A peer review committee of scientists from the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the European Space Agency (ESA), which met here on Monday and Tuesday to review data sets obtained from the scientific instruments onboard India's lunar craft, Chandrayaan-1, has expressed satisfaction on the excellent performance of the lunar mission and its happiness with the high quality of data sent by the spacecraft. 

Credit: ISRO

The mission was recently terminated after ten months in orbit around the moon after a series of malfunctions of sensors and equipment. ISRO claimed the lunar orbiter succeeded in had met 95 per cent of its objectives in this period.

The peer committee review was called to make an initial assessment of the spacecraft's performance as well as that of its payload. 

Scientists have now begun formulating science plans based on the data sets obtained from the mission. It is expected that in the next few months, interesting results about lunar topography, mineral and chemical contents of the moon and related aspects are expected to be published, ISRO said.

ISRO said the 11 payloads carried onboard had largely met their objective of analysing the moon from different perspectives.

The space agency said four onboard instruments -- Terrain Mapping Camera (TMC), Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3), Hyperspectral Imager (HySI) and Smart near Infrared Spectrometer (SIR-2) -- have provided extensive data about the moon's topography, mineralogy and chemistry.