A week after Chandrayaan-1’s sudden end, 10 scientists from international space agencies met on Monday at the Indian Space Research Organisation headquarters here to review the data the satellite collected during its 312-day odyssey of 3,400 orbits around the Moon.
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Of the 11 payloads on board Chandrayaan, six were developed by international space agencies and institutes: the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the European Space Agency, and the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.
Carle Pieters of Brown University (and principal investigator for the Moon Mineralogy Mapper), Robert O. Green from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (United States) and Urs Mall from the Max-Planck Institute in Germany (project leader for the Near Infrared Spectrometer or SIR-2) were among those who attended the meeting which will conclude on Tuesday, said S. Satish, director of public relations, ISRO.
The data analysis will continue for several more months, Mr. Satish said. Asked about the ISRO’s admission that a “miscalculation of the moon’s temperature” led to the satellite’s abrupt end on August 29, ISRO Chairman G. Madhavan Nair said: “Unfortunately, the reflection from the moon was much larger than expected and higher than what the literature data indicated.”
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