NEWS
During the 41st Lunar and Planetary Science Congress organised by the Houston-based Lunar and Planetary Institute, it was announced that vast quantities of water and ice was found on the lunar surface. The findings were not confined to the polar regions alone, but also included the moon’s equatorial regions. The discovery was made by a NASA payload on board Chandrayaan-1 called Mini-SAR _Miniature Synthetic Aperture Radar, a light-weight instrument weighing a mere 10 kg. The radar found more than 40 craters with water ice, and the size of the craters ranged between two to 15 kilometres in diameter.

VIEWS
First vapour, then water molecules and now ice. Though the Indian mission to the moon, Chandrayaan-1, did not complete its two-year planned stay in the lunar orbit, it seems to have collected enough data to keep the scientific community excited and busy for many years to come. The first data from one of its payloads—Moon Mineralogy Mapper or M3—gave molecular clues about possible existence of water on the moon. Now the data sent by another payload—Mini-SAR—and analysed thoroughly by a joint team of Indian and the US scientists has provided evidence about the presence of large deposits of water ice in the permanently shaded areas in its North Pole. The announcement was made on March 1, 2010 and later confirmed by the Director of the Ahmedabad-based Physical Research Laboratory J.N. Goswami. “This is definitely an important discovery. It took us five months to evaluate the findings since we had to convince the scientific community,” he said. Goswami is the principal scientific investigator of the Chandrayaan-1 mission.

It may be recalled that the unmanned Chandrayaan-1, the spacecraft launched by Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) on October 22, 2008, was the first such space mission for India. Staying within an astoundingly low mission cost of around Rs 465 crore ($100 million), the Indian programme thoroughly surprised the world space community which was used to a billion dollar plus costs for such missions. It made up with an array of new findings in only 312 days in space.

Among the many accomplishments of Chandrayaan-1, its biggest discovery was to find hydroxyl and water molecules on the lunar surface which acted as a catalyst for the US lunar probes, such as NASA spacecrafts Cassini and Deep Impact, which had further corroborated the Chandrayaan-1-mounted initial M3 find. However, the water found by M3 in the lit areas of moon was not much. But what the mini-synthetic aperture radar on board Chandrayaan-1 has found in the lunar craters on the dark side of the moon is truly astounding; a finding that indicates the presence of as much as 600 million metric tonnes of water on the moon’s north pole. According to G. Madhavan Nair, Space scientist and former chairman, ISRO, who was at the helm of affairs throughout Chandrayaan-1’s journey, the finding is path-breaking.