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Chandrayaan-1 yielded useful data on Moon's mineralogy |
The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) might
have prematurely terminated the country's first moon exploration mission after
it lost radio contact with Chandrayaan-1 over the weekend, but the probe is already
said to have yielded a treasure trove of useful data. This suggestion comes from
Carle Pieters, a planetary geologist at Brown University in Rhode Island, the
principal investigator of the Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3), a NASA instrument on
Chandrayaan-1. Part of the M3 mission was to determine the distribution of elements
and minerals on the moon's surface, data that NASA had hoped would be useful for
future manned missions to the moon or other planets. Pieters says that before
the probe prematurely ended, the M3 instrument had successfully completed a cursory
global survey of mineralogy on the moon. According to her, that first step was
supposed to set the stage for higher-resolution mapping of the lunar surface.
"(But) even with the low-resolution data we have from the first phase, we have
several new and completely unexpected discoveries," National Geographic News quoted
her as saying. She did not give any information as to what those discoveries might
be, as other scientists are still reviewing the data. Expressing "enormous disappointment"
at the early loss of Chandrayaan-1, she revealed that she and her colleagues were
looking into a future flight of a duplicate M3 instrument. "When you see fantastic
results and taste success, it's almost criminal not to plan for the future," she
said.
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