Moon Missions of India

[FalconSlayers]

Indo-Japanese LUPEX mission also was approved

 

[VictorDelta4]

Correction: Not government approval, but internal approval from ISRO committee.


View: https://x.com/ISROSpaceflight/status/1841825776112410832

 

[Anonymous Bharata]

Chandrayaan-5/LUPEX will soon go for cabinet approval

View: https://x.com/Chethan_Dash/status/1843127490258309141

 

[fire starter]

View: https://x.com/nssdatta/status/1843138344152396086?t=cNpyx0hlCmADlXRcOqiqtg&s=19

 

[VictorDelta4]

 

[Anonymous Bharata]

We are targetting direct south pole in CY-4 mission

Since it will collect both surface & sub-surface samples, there may be chances of bringing back samples with lunar ice

CY-4 mission profile


CY-5 aka LUPEX



@Indx TechStyle @swesh @FalconSlayers

 

[Anonymous Bharata]

We are targetting direct south pole in CY-4 mission
View attachment 12553
Since it will collect both surface & sub-surface samples, there may be chances of bringing back samples with lunar ice

CY-4 mission profile
View attachment 12555

CY-5 aka LUPEX
View attachment 12556
View attachment 12557

@Indx TechStyle @swesh @FalconSlayers

Very ambitious, sub-surface samples will be collected from 2m depth

 

[FalconSlayers]

ISRO's long term crewed lunar exploration plan:
1x Uncrewed Lunar Orbiting mission
1x Crewed Lunar Orbiting
2x Uncrewed Lunar Landing
Crewed Lunar Landing










View: https://www.youtube.com/live/bfV_1Y_hZDM?si=wS2DhAc6NLWMW1W0

 

[Anonymous Bharata]

CY-6 & 7 will also be lander missions to demonstrate In situ Resource Utilisation & Long Duration stay

 

[Indx TechStyle]

India eyeing 2028 deadline for Chandrayaan-4 sample-return mission to Moon​

The South Pole region is the first choice for the landing of Chandrayaan-4 as it has an abundance of water ice. Scientists suspect that the ice can be mined for life support and rocket fuel.​

New Delhi: ISRO Chairman S. Somanath delivers the Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel Memorial Lecture 2024, in New Delhi, Saturday, Oct. 26, 2024. (Photo: PTI)

India plans to launch the Chandrayaan-4 moon sample-return mission in 2028 before sending an uncrewed lander and rover in collaboration with Japan, revealed S Somanath, the chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), during a talk session in New Delhi last week.

The latest mission aims to collect 6.6 pounds (3 kilograms) of lunar samples from a water-ice-rich area close to the south pole of the moon and then deliver the samples to Earth. The Indian government has already approved the mission which is likely to boost its space economy. This Chandrayaan 4 mission was allocated 21 billion rupees ($250 million US).

S. Somanath, shedding light on Isro's upcoming mission, said that the US and Russia have done it in the past, but doing it today is still a huge challenge, and expensive. "We are looking at how we can do a mission to the moon and back in a low-cost manner," he added.

The architecture of the mission includes five spacecraft modules requiring two launches from Isro's most powerful rocket, the LVM-3. The first of the two launches is the transportation of a lander and sample-collecting vehicle and the second one will take a transfer module and a reentry module that will be parked in lunar orbit.

Then the ascender carrying the collected samples will launch from the moon's surface and transfer that precious cargo to the reentry module that is heading to earth for a safe touchdown.

Isro to launch practice mission​

According to the Deccan Herald report, the most challenging task for the Chandrayaan-4 mission is to practise in-orbiting two spacecraft. Later this year or early 2025, Isro will launch a $14 million space docking experience called, Spadex.

Isro has also developed some homegrown technologies which are being developed for the moon mission including a robotic arm to scoop from the lunar surface and a drilling mechanism to collect samples a few metres below the surface.

Landing site is yet to be determined​

The landing region is yet to be announced. According to some previous reports, the mission would aim to land near Shakti Point near the moon's south pole, the same place where India's Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft landed.

The South Pole region is the first choice as it has an abundance of water ice. Scientists suspect that the ice can be mined for life support and rocket fuel.

Nasa also shortlisted nine landing sites near the lunar south pole for its first crewed moon landing, Artemis 3. China is also targeting the south pole aiming to put astronauts on the moon before the end of the decade.

India-Japan joint mission​

While for the Chandrayaan-5 mission, also known as the Lunar Polar Exploration Project, or LUPEX, there will be a joint project between Isro and Japan's JAXA, involving a 770-pound (350 kg) rover. Somnath said that Lupex will be a dozen times heavier than the 60-pound (27 kg) Pragyan that flew on Chandrayaan-3.

India will provide the lander, mission planning and payloads, while Japan will contribute the launch vehicle, various payloads and the rover. Both sides will contribute to ground penetrating radar, a range of spectrometers and water analysis instruments.

India aims to land astronauts on the moon by 2040 and will establish a moon base before 2050.

For now, "all of us are excited to design and develop this complex mission [Chandrayaan-4] and make it happen by 2028," Somanath added.

 

[Blademaster]

India eyeing 2028 deadline for Chandrayaan-4 sample-return mission to Moon​

The South Pole region is the first choice for the landing of Chandrayaan-4 as it has an abundance of water ice. Scientists suspect that the ice can be mined for life support and rocket fuel.​

New Delhi: ISRO Chairman S. Somanath delivers the Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel Memorial Lecture 2024, in New Delhi, Saturday, Oct. 26, 2024. (Photo: PTI)

Isro to launch practice mission​

Landing site is yet to be determined​

India-Japan joint mission​

I thought ISRO was the one that was gonna launch the probes and provide the lander while Japan would provide satellites and rover etc.

 

[Indx TechStyle]

I thought ISRO was the one that was gonna launch the probes and provide the lander while Japan would provide satellites and rover etc.

In case of LUPEX (Chandrayaan-5), Japan would be providing the heavy rover and launcher (India doesn't have a rocket powerful as H-III). India will just provide lander. LUPEX essentially is just a Japanese mission using Indian landing technology.

They will learn & get lander tech and we would learn to make RTEG based heavy rovers for Chandrayaan-6 & 7 (it seems like that kind of tech exchange only hopefully).

 

[Anonymous Bharata]

In case of LUPEX (Chandrayaan-5), Japan would be providing the heavy rover and launcher (India doesn't have a rocket powerful as H-III). India will just provide lander. LUPEX essentially is just a Japanese mission using Indian landing technology.

They will learn & get lander tech and we would learn to make RTEG based heavy rovers for Chandrayaan-6 & 7 (it seems like that kind of tech exchange only hopefully).

Its not a Japanese mission using Indian lander, this mission includes science payloads from our side as well, it's a joint mission, an Indo-Japanese mission.

Your statement might hold true if there are only Japanese science instruments onboard.

LUPEX won't have RTG, neither will CY-6 & 7

 

[Indx TechStyle]

neither will CY-6 & 7

They would

 

[Anonymous Bharata]

They would

Sauce?

 

[Indx TechStyle]

Sauce?

Heard somewhere in a speech by Somanath that RTEG in development will be the basis of upcoming long duration Indian deep space missions.

 

[swesh]

Chandrayaan-2 Radar (DFSAR) discloses potential icy craters on the Moon​

Deepak Putrevu | May 1, 2025 | 376 Views | 0 Comments

Authors– Deepak Putrevu, Tathagata Chakraborty and DFSAR team, Space Application Center, ISRO Ahmedabad.



Radar studies of the lunar surface have so far been restricted to Earth-based radio telescopes and Moon-orbiting sensors operating with limited polarimetry configuration. The Dual-frequency Synthetic Aperture Radar (DFSAR) onboard Chandrayaan-2 (Ch-2) orbiter is the first ever state-of-the-art high-resolution radar system in the lunar orbit. To this date, the DFSAR instrument operated in fully polarimetric (FP) configuration during ten imaging seasons (spanning 5 years), to acquire more than fifteen hundred datasets, imaging significant amount (~80%) of lunar polar regions (80°-90° N/S) (Figure 1) and some important targets in non-polar regions. The datasets are publicly available in ISRO portal for Planetary Science data (https://pradan.issdc.gov.in).

The DFSAR datasets are processed to achieve several key results envisaged from the mission as mentioned below.

• Characterization of radar scattering from various lunar impact craters to study crater degradation process.
• Estimation of electrical (dielectric constant) and physical (surface roughness) properties of lunar surface.
• Derivation of potential water ice bearing regions in the shadowed regions of the lunar poles.
• Radar characterization of volcanic features such as impact melts, pyroclastic deposits.
• Studying subsurface buried features like subsurface ejecta, melt flow, crypto-mare.
• Assessment of presence of volatiles and landing hazards in the lunar polar regions for defining future landing sites.

The results obtained from DFSAR helped to address some of the most fundamental questions in lunar science related to the physical properties of the lunar volcanic terrain, volatiles (especially water ice), geological evolution of impact craters and their associated melt and ejecta deposits, etc. In particular, the salient results obtained from DFSAR based studies are as follows.

Figure 1: Circular Polarization Ratio (CPR) maps derived from full-pol (FP) L-band DFSAR data for north polar region (left), and south polar region (right) from 80°-90° N/S latitude band.

Using DFSAR data, the presence of centimeter-to-decimeter scale surface roughness has been established as the major reason for anomalous nature of many of the craters in polar regions of the Moon, thereby, rectifying the previous understanding on this. The findings reveal that the crater degradation (aging) process controls the change in the physical nature of the targets present in various impact craters leading to deviation in the radar scattering behavior. Earlier radar based evidences on occurrence of water ice in the lunar poles were ambiguous because of similar radar scattering behavior of water ice and surface roughness. However, using DFSAR datasets, decoupling of the radar signatures from these two factors has been achieved. The results suggest potential presence of water ice in some of the polar anomalous craters situated in Peary and near Rozhdestvenskiy W crater in north pole, and in Shoemaker, Faustini, Haworth, Idel’son and Cabeus crater in south pole (Figure 2).


Figure 2: Map showing potential water ice bearing craters in the lunar north (left) and south pole (right). The background map is the CPR mosaic derived from DFSAR L-band FP data.

Using high-resolution DFSAR data collected over Chandrayaan-3 Vikram landing site, prior- and post-landing, fine-scale characterization of surficial changes has been demonstrated. This data revealed that the lander descent resulted in changes in regolith (upper layer) spread over an area of about 177 m2 surrounding the landing site.

Lunar impact melt deposits have unique physical properties compared to other lunar terrain: they are very rough similar to those of terrestrial blocky and rubbly lava flows at the centimeter- to decimeter-scale, as interpreted from DFSAR data.

Reference:

Kochar, I., Das, A., and Panigrahi, R.K. (2024), A unique dielectric constant estimator for lunar surface through PolSAR mode-based decomposition, ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, vol. 2018, part B, pp 546-554, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isprsjprs.2024.10.022.
Chakraborty, T., Pandey, D.K., Mehra, R., Parasher, P., Putrevu, D., Ramanujam, V.M., and Desai, N.M. (2024), Polarimetric characterization of Chandrayaan-3 landing site near lunar south pole using high resolution Chandrayaan-2 DFSAR data, Planetary and Space Science, 251, 105956. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pss.2024.105956.
Rajasekhar, R.P., Dagar, A.K., Nagori, R., Bhiravarasu, S.S., Ojha, S.P., and Bhattacharya, S. (2024), Comprehensive analysis of Chandrayaan-3 landing site region focussing on morphology, hydration and gravity anomalies, Icarus, vol. 415, 116074, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.icarus.2024.116074.
Putrevu, D., Chakraborty, T., Mukhopadhyay, J., Syed, T. H., Bhiravarasu, S. S., Das, A., Pandey, D. K., Misra, A. (2023), “Lunar Impact Craters: New Perspectives from Full-polarimetric analysis of Chandrayaan-2 Dual-Frequency SAR data”, Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, 128, e2023JE007745.
Kochar, I., Chakraborty, T., Bhiravarasu, S. S., Das, A., Putrevu, D., Panigrahi, R. (2023), “Estimation of Lunar Surface Roughness using Chandrayaan-2 Full-Polarimetric DFSAR Data”, Icarus, 406, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.icarus.2023.115720.
Sharma, A., Kumar, S., Bhiravarasu, S. S. (2022), “Integral Equation Modelling for Dielectric Retrieval of the Lunar Surface using Chandrayaan-2 Fully-Polarimetric L-band Dual Frequency SAR (DFSAR) Data”, Icarus, 391, 115350,https://doi.org/10.1016/j.icarus.2022.115350.
Kochar, I., Maurya, H., Kumar, A., Bhiravarasu, S. S., Das, A., Putrevu, D., Pandey, D. K., Panigrahi, R. (2022), “Retrieval of Lunar Surface Dielectric Constant using Chandrayaan-2 Full-Polarimetric SAR Data”, IEEE Transactions in Geoscience and Remote Sensing, vol. 60, https://doi.org/10.1109/TGRS.2022.3201050.
Bhiravarasu, S. S., Chakraborty, T., Putrevu, D., Pandey, D. K., Das, A., Ramanujam, V. M., Mehra, R., Parasher, P., Agrawal, K. M., Gupta, S., Seth, G. S., Shukla, A., Pandya, N. Y., Trivedi, S., Misra, A., Jyoti, R., Kumar, R. (2021), “Chandrayaan- 2 Dual-Frequency SAR (DFSAR): Performance Characterization and Initial Results”, The Planetary Science Journal, 2 (134), https://doi.org/10.3847/PSJ/abfdbf.
Kumar, A., Kochar, I., Pandey, D. K., Das, A., Putrevu, D., Kumar, R., Panigrahi, R. (2021), “Dielectric Constant Estimation of Lunar Surface Using Mini-RF and Chandrayaan-2 SAR Data”, IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, vol. 60, doi: 10.1109/TGRS.2021.3103383.
Putrevu, D., Trivedi, S., Das, A., Pandey, D. K., Mehrotra, P., Garg, S. K., Reddy, V., Gangele, S., Patel, H., Sharma, D., Sijwali, R., Pandya, N. Y., Shukla, A., Seth, G. S., Ramanujam, V. M., Kumar, R. (2020), “L- and S-band Polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar on Chandrayaan-2 mission”, Current science. 118(2), 25,226-233.
Putrevu, D., Das, A., Vachhani, J. G., Trivedi, S., Misra, T. (2016), “Chandrayaan-2 Dual-frequency SAR: Further investigation into lunar water and regolith”, Advances in Space Research., 57, 627–646.