Article Posted on : - Oct 20, 2008

Manuel Grande, a professor at the Aberystwyth University in Wales

LONDON (PTI): A British scientist is eagerly looking forward to the launch of India's first unmanned moon mission, Chandrayaan-1, for which he designed a camera that will photograph the moon's surface. Chandrayaan-1 is scheduled to lift off from Satish Dhawan Space Centre at Sriharikota on October 22.

�It is going to be great. It has been a lot of work but fingers crossed everything goes okay. I am busy trying to get my travel arrangements sorted out to attend the launch in India,� said Manuel Grande, a professor at the Aberystwyth University in Wales, who worked on the project since helping to develop a prototype, which came for a European mission in 2003.

The camera on the current mission is of the size of a toaster and will be fixed onto a shelf of the unmanned Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft. The camera will photograph elements which may match elements on Earth, said Grandem, head of Solar System Physics at university's Institute of Mathematical and Physical Sciences.

�The surface area of the moon is about the size of Africa. What nobody knows is whether the Earth and Moon were formed together,� the 53-year-old British scientist said.
He said that in the early Solar System's history there may have been a massive collision between a planet like Mars and Earth causing debris to collect as the Moon. Gravity then pulled it into a sphere.

The camera can tell of what the Moon is made of. Tests will compare these elements with those on Earth to see if they match. �This will be new data. The Moon is what the Earth used to be like. It has not changed. It is frozen in time,� Grande said.