Indian flag's moon date, thanks to Chandrayaan

MUMBAI: If things go as planned, the Indian tricolour will mark its presence on the moon tonight (around 8.30pm IST) after having flown 3,86,000km from the earth. The timing of this proud moment has been specially designed to coincide with Children's Day.
The United States, the former Soviet Union and the European Space Agency comprising 17 countries already have their flags on the moon.

The Indian tricolour is painted on all sides of the 29-kg Moon Impact Probe which is attached to the main orbiting spacecraft, Chandrayaan-1, which was launched on October 22.

The inclusion of the MIP as part of the Chandrayaan mission came at the suggestion of former President A P J Abdul Kalam, a former rocket scientist, during the International Lunar Exploration Working Group conference held at Udaipur in November 2004.

The Indian tricolour has been hoisted on Mount Everest and Antarctica. And now it will be on the moon though it will not be hoisted.

The flight of the MIP on Friday is expected to be a forerunner to the second Indian moon mission, Chandrayaan-2, which will carry a Russian rover and alander slated for lift-off between 2010 and 2012. The crash landing of MIP will help in assessing future soft-landing technologies.

Chandrayaan project director Mylaswamy Annadurai explained to TOI on Friday that at about 8 pm on Friday, a command will be flashed to the MIP from Isro's telemetry, tracking and command network (Istrac) at Bangalore for it to detach from the orbiter. "The MIP will separate and with its three instruments, zoom towards the lunar south pole at a velocity of 1.5km per second," he said.

"At Istrac's mission control room, we will immediately come to know that the MIP has separated from the orbiter. The MIP's flight path will first take it over the Malapert crater for about nine seconds and then crashland near the Shackleton Crater about 25 minutes after its detachment from the orbiter. Malapert Crater is not far from the Shackleton crater," he added.

Annadurai said that after this, the orbiter will fly in the opposite side and thus data will not be immediately available. "The downloading of data from the MIP to the orbiting Chandrayaan and then to the ground station will start once the spacecraft comes over the north pole of the moon. It will take a couple of hours for the data from the MIP to be downloaded and processed," Annadurai said.

He said that once the MIP crashlands on the moon, its own survivability and that of the three instruments will be in question. The probe uses solid propellants. "India's physical presence on the moon with the tricolour will be assured," he said.