Having completed 16 launches of its own space vehicles-with a success rate of 75 percent-and mastered the art of making as many as 20 satellites, the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), headquartered in India’s “Silicon Valley,” Bangalore, now wants to look to outer space as its new horizon.

ISRO’s 144-foot (44-meter) Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) rocket, which weighs a whopping 294 tons, costs about U.S. $18 million, and can carry loads up to 2,600 pounds (1,200 kg), might just be the vehicle which will launch India into a new era of space exploration-first to the moon and then even farther.

PLANS UNDERWAY

“The spirit of enquiry and exploration which has always been so much a part of ISRO has to be sustained and nurtured in years to come,” says Krishnaswamy Kasturirangan, an experimental astronomer and chairman of ISRO.

As a first step towards this, plans are already underway for an exploratory unmanned mission to the moon.

Having mastered almost from scratch the entire cycle of manufacturing and launching 1000 kg (2,200-pound) satellites, ISRO is now looking for new vistas to keep its workforce of more than 12,000 scientists and engineers engaged in cutting-edge research and development.

Recently, what caused much excitement in the Indian scientific community was Kasturirangan’s announcement that ISRO’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle can actually “undertake a mission to the moon.”

A core team of scientists has been put together to work out the details of how India could launch a small satellite of about 600 pounds (275 kg) for a fly-by mission, or place a 300-pound (140-kg) satellite in an orbit around the moon. This payload compares favorably with recent American missions to the moon such as the Lunar Prospector and Clementine.

“ISRO is today technically fully capable to take on a mission to moon,” Serge Plattard, a nuclear physicist and director of International Relations, Centre National D’Etudes Spatiales (CNES), Paris, told the American magazine Science, adding that ’it is natural to reach out to new frontiers when you have reached maturity.”

Plattard says that “geo-political reasons of being first in the region” could well be a motivating force for India to plan a mission to moon. Moreover, he adds, a challenging mission to outer space is always bound to attract huge publicity.

MISSION TO BE WORKED OUT

Though the final purpose of the mission is still to be worked out, most likely it will be to study the moon’s core and also to take high-resolution, remote-sensing images of the moon’s surface.

India already has a proven capability of building sophisticated remote-sensing cameras, and if all goes well the first lunar mission could have a gamma ray spectrometer to map the surface of the moon at a resolution of about 10 meters (11 yards).

To date, the moon’s surface has been mapped only at the resolution of about 40 meters (44 yards) and many scientific secrets are likely to be revealed about the early history of the solar system by studying the moon more intensively, says Narendra Bhandari, a planetary scientist at the Physical Research Laboratory, Ahemdabad, in eastern India, who has worked extensively on moon rock samples and asteroids. “We cannot not afford to go to the moon,” says Bhandari, who feels India’s proven capability to build exacting space instrumentation and sensors will go to waste if daring missions are not planned.

Not everyone has been won over by ISRO.

A ’FOOLHARDY INDULGENCE’

Some Indian aerospace scientists call the proposed moon mission a “foolhardy indulgence” on part of the already cash-strapped Indian space agency.

Destination moon could well symbolize the next big challenge for ISRO, which has most of the satellite technology well under its belt, says Kasturirangan. Working out the mission’s objectives and payload could take time, and if all goes well it could be a reality in the very early part of the next century, maybe as early as 2005, some sources in ISRO hint.

According to Kasturirangan, the cost will be estimated only once the scientific details have been worked out. The government will be approached for funds only once there is consensus among scientists that it is useful to undertake such a complex mission.