Indian Institute of Astrophysics

Lunar

Isro

Joice Mathew

Satellite

A team of students from the(IIA) here has developed a telescope called theUltraviolet Cosmic Imager (LUCI), which will be onboard city-based startup Team Indus’s spacecraft to the moon.The IIA team has collaborated with Team Indus, and the telescope will be part of the Indian entry into the Google X-Prize competition to send a rover to the moon.Team Indus is among the five teams competing for the $30 million Google Lunar XPRIZE, a global competition challenging privately funded teams to land a spacecraft on the moon.The startup is building a spacecraft, which will be launched by the Indian Space Research Organi­sation () in December.LUCI will be mounted on the lunar lander developed by Team Indus and will survey the sky from the surface of the moon.The main objective of the 1.2 kg LUCI telescope will be to focus on bright Ultraviolet (UV) sources that are not accessible by the more sensitive large space missions.“We want to scan the sky in the UV domain from the lunar surface. Observations from the moon provide a unique opportunity to observe the sky. Our aim is focused on bright UV sources not accessible by the more sensitive large space UV missions like Isro’s Astrosat mission or for that matter NASA’s Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer mission or the Hubble Space Telescope,” said, a member of the IIA team.The project for developing the telescope started in 2013 and is funded by the department of science and technology. The IIA plans to deliver the telescope by September to Team Indus, three months before the launch of the spacecraft onboard Isro’s PolarLaunch Vehicle.“One of the biggest challenges for the team was to develop a very compact payload, weighing just 1.2 kg. Now that we have been successful in achieving it, the structural qualification of the payload will happen this month and then, we will deliver the telescope by September,” said Mathew.