<img class="styles__noscript__2rw2y" src="https://s.w-x.co/util/image/w/in-c7.jpg?v=at&w=485&h=273" srcset="https://s.w-x.co/util/image/w/in-c7.jpg?v=at&w=485&h=273 400w, https://s.w-x.co/util/image/w/in-c7.jpg?v=ap&w=980&h=551 800w" > Chandrayaan blasts off from Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh on October 22, 2008 (Phot: L R Shankar/ TOI, BCCL Chennai )

Distances in space are brain-meltingly vast. Compared to the stars and planets billions of light years away, our Moon is barely 4 lakh kilometres from us—a simple Uber ride, in interstellar terms. And with things getting increasingly hairy on Earth thanks to freak weather, scary resource shortages , and environmental messes of every description, the Moon is looking more appealing than ever: as Earth’s first space outpost, a transit stop and fuelling station for journeys to other worlds... perhaps even a future human colony!

But despite being one of the most explored celestial bodies out there, the Moon still harbours many mysteries. This has led to renewed efforts by global space agencies to study and explore it. For India, a society that’s been looking at the skies for centuries due to its Vedic roots in astronomy and astrology, the quest to reach the Moon was more than merely symbolic. Now, as Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) starts the countdown for its second lunar mission, Chandrayaan-2, let’s recap how we reached the Moon a decade ago.

Chandrayaan-1 in a nutshell

<img class="styles__noscript__2rw2y" src="https://s.w-x.co/util/image/w/in-c6.jpg?v=at&w=485&h=273" srcset="https://s.w-x.co/util/image/w/in-c6.jpg?v=at&w=485&h=273 400w, https://s.w-x.co/util/image/w/in-c6.jpg?v=ap&w=980&h=551 800w" > A view of Chandrayaan-1, India's first unmanned mission to the moon, at the ISRO Centre in Bangalore in 2008 (Photo: K Sunil Prasad/ TOI Bengaluru)

In 2008, India launched its first deep space mission, Chandrayaan 1. It was a historic moment for ISRO, which launched its first satellite, Aryabhatta, six years after the US Apollo 11’s crew landed on the moon. Considering its delayed entry into the space club, India and ISRO has made a remarkable progress in space exploration over the last three decades.

Chandrayaan-1’s story is well known. In a nutshell, India’s first deep space mission lasted approximately a year from its October 2008 launch to its abrupt end in August 2009. Its biggest claim to fame was helping find water ice at the Moon’s poles. Perhaps all that sudden fame was hard to handle, because in August 2009, the satellite lost contact with its controllers at ISRO. However, Chandrayaan-1 was rediscovered by NASA in 2017. While it has long been defunct, it is probably still silently orbiting the Moon, perhaps waiting to hail its compatriot, Chandrayaan-2, with a cheery ‘namaste ’ when the latter swings by later this year.

The mission

<img class="styles__noscript__2rw2y" src="https://s.w-x.co/util/image/w/in-c1.jpg?v=at&w=485&h=273" srcset="https://s.w-x.co/util/image/w/in-c1.jpg?v=at&w=485&h=273 400w, https://s.w-x.co/util/image/w/in-c1.jpg?v=ap&w=980&h=551 800w" > The PSLV-C11 rocket, with the orbiter and probe on board, on its way to the launchpad (Photo: ISRO)

Humankind has sent probes to the Moon for six decades now. The first lunar flyby happened in 1959; the first touchdown in 1966, and the first crewed landing (Neil Armstrong’s big moment) in 1969. Between 1959 and 1976, the race to the Moon was dominated entirely by the US and Soviet space agencies. But as technology and wherewithal spread, Japan, Europe and China stepped in with their own lunar missions in 1990, 2003 and 2007 respectively.

India’s Chandrayaan-1 mission, also its first lunar mission, was announced by the government in 2003. The objective was to map the chemical, mineralogical and photo-geologic features of the Moon and create a 3D atlas of its near and far (dark) side. As the precursor to Chandrayaan-2, the first lunar mission would also test conditions for an eventual soft-landing on the Moon’s surface.

Over the next 5 years, ISRO rapidly developed the spacecraft’s components: the PSLV-C11 rocket that carried it into space, an orbiter, and a Moon Impact Probe (MIP). It was a budget spaceship, built at a cost of Rs.386 crore, or US$76 million, only 4% of ISRO’s (then) budget over 3 years. (For comparison, China’s Chang’e 1 lunar mission, launched in 2007, cost $180 million. Chandrayaan-2 will cost about $143 million. India’s upcoming human space flight programme? An estimated $1.46 billion.)

<img class="styles__noscript__2rw2y" src="https://s.w-x.co/util/image/w/in-mineral_map_c1_0.jpg?v=at&w=485&h=273" srcset="https://s.w-x.co/util/image/w/in-mineral_map_c1_0.jpg?v=at&w=485&h=273 400w, https://s.w-x.co/util/image/w/in-mineral_map_c1_0.jpg?v=ap&w=980&h=551 800w" > This image of the moon is from NASA's Moon Mineralogy Mapper on Chandrayaan-1. It is a three-color composite of reflected near-infrared radiation from the sun, and illustrates the extent to which different materials are mapped across the side of the moon that faces Earth. Blue shows the signature of water and hydroxyl molecules, green shows the brightness of the surface, and red shows an iron-bearing mineral called pyroxene. (ISRO/NASA/JPL-Caltech/Brown Univ./USGS)

Coming back to Chandrayaan-1, the orbiter was based on Kalpana-1, a meteorological satellite launched by India in 2002, and carried a phalanx of instruments, from sophisticated cameras to equipment for studying the external and internal features of the Moon. A 32-kg Moon Impact Probe (MIP), meanwhile, was designed to crash into the surface after taking videos of the surface and studying the lunar atmosphere during the descent process. In addition to five Indian instruments, Chandrayaan carried equipment from the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden, and Bulgaria— most notably, a Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) instrument from NASA.

The 1.4 tonne (at launch) Chandrayaan-1 blasted off on October 22, 2008, meeting all takeoff and Earth orbit success parameters. Then, on November 8, Chandrayaan moved into lunar orbit. And that’s where the real mission began.

Journey and results

<img class="styles__noscript__2rw2y" src="https://s.w-x.co/util/image/w/in-watermoon_2.png?v=at&w=485&h=273" srcset="https://s.w-x.co/util/image/w/in-watermoon_2.png?v=at&w=485&h=273 400w, https://s.w-x.co/util/image/w/in-watermoon_2.png?v=ap&w=980&h=551 800w" > The image shows the distribution of surface ice at the Moon's south pole (left) and north pole (right), detected by NASA's Moon Mineralogy Mapper instrument. Blue represents the ice locations, plotted over an image of the lunar surface, where the gray scale corresponds to surface temperature (darker representing colder areas and lighter shades indicating warmer zones). The ice is concentrated at the darkest and coldest locations, in the shadows of craters. This was the first time scientists directly observed definitive evidence of water ice on the Moon's surface. (Credit: NASA)

After orbiting the Moon for a few days, Chandrayaan eventually reached a height of 100 km above the surface. On November 14, the Moon Impact Probe left the orbiter and crashed near the lunar South Pole. As it free-fell for some 25 minutes, the probe reportedly took readings that suggested the presence of water vapour in the moon’s atmosphere. However, that data is apparently inconclusive.

More significantly, the probe sent readings back to the orbiter that indicated the presence of water on the surface and the sub-surface (“tens of metres deep”) under the north and south poles of the Moon. In parallel, NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3), which remained in the orbiter, also found data that eventually confirmed the presence of solid water ice in the shadows of craters near the poles, where temperatures hover around -157°C.

<img class="styles__noscript__2rw2y" src="https://s.w-x.co/util/image/w/in-c4.jpg?v=at&w=485&h=273" srcset="https://s.w-x.co/util/image/w/in-c4.jpg?v=at&w=485&h=273 400w, https://s.w-x.co/util/image/w/in-c4.jpg?v=ap&w=980&h=551 800w" > Cropped version of an image sent back by the Moon Impact Probe before it crash-landed on the surface (Photo: ISRO)

These findings made huge waves in the space community and global media. To be clear, this wasn’t the first time evidence of surface ice was found on the Moon—the Soviets claimed they found water in moon rocks brought back in 1976 . NASA’s own probes have analysed reflected radio waves that showed the signature of water ice. However, the findings were inconclusive, and as NASA admitted, could have been explained by other phenomena, such as “unusually reflective lunar soil”.

In 2009, the US sent a Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and impact probe (LCROSS) that complemented Chandrayaan-1’s discovery of water at the lunar poles. And in 2013, the same M3 team from NASA also detected ‘magmatic water’ , i.e. water from beneath the Moon’s interiors, on the surface of a crater—yet another feather in the mission’s cap.

Unfortunately, after making 3400 orbits of the Moon, equipment failure forced the mission to be abandoned after August 28, 2009—nearly a year prematurely. However, ISRO says that 95% of mission objectives had been met by then.

Chandrayaan-1 enabled the confirmation of water on the Moon. In the process, it also enhanced humankind’s thirst for interstellar adventure. There’s no looking back.