The discovery of water on the moon may have been made public only now, but scientists at ISRO had got wind of it almost a year ago.
The discovery of water on the moon may have been made public only now, but scientists at ISRO had got wind of it almost a year ago.
"The NASA scientists suspected it was water when they noticed a thermal signature of 3 micron wavelength.
They were confused and surprised at the same time," a highly placed ISRO source told MiD DAY.
The first signs were detected by the Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3), a NASA-built instrument that came as a guest payload on Chandrayaan 1, when it was operated on November 18, 2008.
The data from the M3 which would change lunar exploration forever - was confirmed only after checking against data from two earlier missions who had detected similar signs: the Visual Infrared Mapping Spectrometer on the Cassini spacecraft and the High Resolution Infrared Imaging Spectrometer on the EPOXI spacecraft.
Though it was NASA scientists who interpreted the data, their Indian counterparts were clued in on the discovery from an early stage. However scientific procedure and a strict policy of confidentiality meant that the findings couldn't be revealed until they were confirmed, he added.u00a0
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Not so dry: These images show a very young lunar crater on the side of the moon that faces away from Earth, as viewed by NASA's Moon Mineralogy Mapper on the Indian Space Research Organisation's Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft.
pic courtesy nasa.gov |
ISRO's role
Not only was the mission completely run by ISRO, the agency also "decided the orbit of the satellite, which played a big role in the discovery," the scientist said. The M3 data too was routed by ISRO to NASA, which then interpreted it.
"ISRO followed a process of feeding continuous data to NASA by setting up a link from Bangalore to Maryland" said the source, a top ISRO scientist. "All credit to them for looking at the data."
All the raw material, about 1,000 gigabytes of information, was supplied by ISRO. "Our main aim was to supply information," he explained. "Everything came through us. We first brought the information down to earth and processed it."
The ISRO had also signed a data policy with NASA, which laid down that only principal scientists in the US would look at the information.
The scientist, gagged by an official order, opened up on condition of anonymity when MiD DAY requested information.
Bad days
Post August 29, 2009, when contact with the Chandrayaan was lost, scientists were feeling low. "But this news has brightened everything. Internally we had an inclination of what was happening but we waited patiently," he said.
ISRO scientists were elated. He was all praise for NASA and congratulated and complemented them on their work.
The scientist felt ISRO had already established itself, and "a mission of this size puts us in a fairly strong position."
