Orbiter payloads on Chandrayaan 2 makes Discovery class findings.

Chandrayaan-2 orbiter payloads made discovery-class findings, says ISRO

The observations of the Indian spacecraft Chandrayaan-2 orbiter payloads have yielded discovery-class findings, according to the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).

There were eight scientific payloads hosted on the orbiter craft.

They are: Chandrayaan-2 Large Area Soft X-ray Spectrometer (CLASS), Solar X-ray Monitor (XSM), CHandra's Atmospheric Compositional Explorer 2 (CHACE 2), Dual Frequency Synthetic Aperture Radar (DFSAR), Imaging Infra-Red Spectrometer (IIRS), Terrain Mapping Camera (TMC 2), Orbiter High Resolution Camera (OHRC), and Dual Frequency Radio Science (DFRS) experiment.

Earlier this week, ISRO opened up its scientific discussions on Lunar Science to "the people of the country, to engage the Indian academia, institutes, students, and people from all disciplines and walks of life", in the form of a two-day 'Lunar Science Workshop & Release of Chandrayaan-2 Data'.

The workshop commemorated the completion of two years of the Chandrayaan-2 orbiter in the lunar orbit. The events were conducted in virtual mode.

ISRO Chairman and Secretary in the Department of Space (DoS) K Sivan inaugurated the workshop and released the documents on Chandrayaan-2 science results and data products for utilisation by the scientific community.

"The lunar workshop delivered the big news of bunch of discovery-class of findings by Chandrayaan-2", the Bengaluru headquartered India's national space agency said.

The mass spectrometer CHACE-2, in its pursuit to conduct first-ever in-situ study of the composition of the lunar neutral exosphere from a polar orbital platform, detected and studied the variability of the Argon-40 at the middle and higher latitudes of the Moon, depicting the radiogenic activities in the mid and higher latitudes of the Lunar interior, it said.

The discovery of Chromium and Manganese on the lunar surface, which are available in trace quantities, by the CLASS payload was announced.

The observations of microflares of the Sun, during the quiet-Sun period, which provide important clues on the coronal heating problem of the Sun, were made by the XSM payload.

The first-ever unambiguous detection of the hydration features of the Moon was achieved by Chandrayaan-2 with its infra-red spectrometer payload IIRS, which captured clear signatures of Hydroxyl and water-ice on the lunar surface, ISRO said.

The DFSAR instrument could study the subsurface features of the Moon, detected signatures of the sub-surface water-ice, and achieved high resolution mapping of the lunar morphological features in the polar regions, it was stated.

"The observations (of Chandrayaan-2 orbiter payloads) have been yielding intriguing scientific results, which are being published in peer-reviewed journals and presented in international meetings," Sivan said.

Chandrayaan-2, ISRO said, has the feat of imaging the Moon from 100 km lunar orbit with "best-ever" achieved resolution of 25 cm with its OHRC.

The TMC 2 of Chandrayaan-2, which is conducting imaging of the Moon at a global scale, has found interesting geologic signatures of lunar crustal shortening, and identification of volcanic domes, the ISRO said.

The DFRS experiment onboard Chandrayaan-2 has studied the ionosphere of the Moon, which is generated by the solar photo-ionisation of the neutral species of the lunar tenuous exosphere, it was noted.

The science data archived in Indian Space Science Data Centre (ISSDC) at Byalalu, near here, are being disseminated to public through its 'PRADAN' portal.

The questions received from the academia, institutes and students were addressed by the ISRO scientists during the two-day deliberations.

A panel discussion provided the opportunity to academia, institutes and students to interact with the ISRO scientists on lunar science and Chandrayaan-2, ISRO said.

Chandrayaan-2 is the second spacecraft in the Indian series of Lunar exploration satellites. It comprised an orbiter, lander named Vikram and rover named Pragyan to explore the unexplored South Polar region of the Moon. It was launched on July 22, 2019 from the Sriharikota spaceport by GSLV Mk-III. It was inserted into a lunar orbit on August 20, 2019, with firing of thrusters on the orbiter.

The orbiter and lander modules were separated as two independent satellites on September 2, 2019.

Later, Vikram lander's descent was as planned and normal performance was observed up to an altitude of 2.1 km from Lunar surface on September seven, 2019. Subsequently, communication from the lander (with the six-wheeled Pragyan rover accommodated inside it) was lost and the lander had a hard landing on the lunar surface.

A successful soft-landing would have made India the fourth country after the erstwhile Soviet Union, the United States, and China to do so, according to ISRO officials.

The orbiter, placed in its intended orbit around the Moon, will enrich our understanding of the Moon's evolution and mapping of minerals and water molecules in polar regions, using its eight advanced scientific instruments, according to ISRO.

The precise launch and optimised mission management have ensured a long life of almost seven years for the orbiter instead of the planned one year, it said.

 

Chandrayaan-2 Orbiter detects solar proton events, says ISRO

A Large Area Soft X-ray Spectrometer (CLASS), a payload on-board Chandrayaan-2 Orbiter, has detected solar proton events (SPEs) which significantly increase radiation exposure to humans in space, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) said on Wednesday.

The instrument on January 18 also recorded coronal mass ejections (CMEs), a powerful stream of ionised material and magnetic fields, which reach the Earth a few days later, leading to geomagnetic storms and lighting up the polar sky with auroras, it said. Such multi-point observations help us understand the propagation and its impact on different planetary systems, the ISRO said. When the Sun is active, spectacular eruptions called solar flares occur that sometimes also spew out energetic particles (called Solar Proton Events or SPEs) into interplanetary space.


Most of these are high energy protons that impact space systems and significantly increase radiation exposure to humans in space. They can cause ionisation on large scales in Earth's middle atmosphere, the space agency said.

Many intense solar flares are accompanied by CMEs, a powerful stream of ionised material and magnetic fields, which reach the Earth a few days later, leading to geomagnetic storms and lighting up the polar sky with auroras. Solar flares are classified according to their strength. The smallest ones are A-class, followed by B, C, M and X. Each letter represents a 10-fold increase in energy output. This means that an M class flare is ten times more intense than C-class flare and 100 times intense than B-class flare, the ISRO said. Within each letter class there is a finer scale from 1 to 9 - a M2 flare is twice the strength of M1 flare.

 

Chandrayaan-2 makes exciting new discovery below Moon's surface

As it awaits the arrival of its successor Chandrayaan-3 in August this year, Chandrayaan-2 has once again found new developments happening under the surface of the Moon. Chandra’s Atmospheric Composition Explorer-2 (CHACE-2) instrument onboard Chandrayaan-2 has found Argon-40 in the tenuous lunar exosphere.

The new observations provide insight into the dynamics of the lunar exospheric species and activities in the first few tens of meters below the lunar surface that could pave the way for understanding the composition of the lunar surface. The observations show the presence of Argon in the equatorial and mid-latitude regions of the Moon. While it's not the first time that Argon-40 has been detected on the Moon, so far these detections had been limited to near-equatorial regions as seen by the Apollo-17 mission.

Led by M. B. Dhanya of the Vikram Sarabhai Space Center, the team of astronomers found an increase in the density of Argon-40 near the sunrise terminator, a decrease along the dayside, a secondary peak near the sunset terminator, and a night-side minimum. However, the biggest revelation was that the density of Argon-40 with respect to solar longitudes is similar to that of low latitude regions, despite the differences in temperature and topography.

"The observations of the Argon bulge by CHACE-2 are indicative of unknown or additional loss processes, Moon quakes or regions with lower activation energies, which call for a better understanding of the surface-exosphere interactions and source distributions of Ar-40," Isro said.

The CHACE-2 was a sequel to the CHACE experiment on the Moon Impact Probe (MIP) of Chandrayaan-1 mission and also draws heritage from the Mars Exospheric Neutral Composition Analyser (MENCA) experiment aboard the Indian Mars Orbiter Mission.

 

ISRO revealed that the Chandrayaan-2 orbiter has mapped the surface composition of sodium on the Moon for the first time.

ISRO's Chandrayaan-2 orbiter maps abundance of Sodium on the Moon for the first time

The Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO) Chandrayaan 2 Orbiter has mapped the abundance of sodium on the Moon for the first time. This milestone was achieved using the X-ray spectrometer instrument named CLASS onboard the Orbiter which was built at the U R Rao Satellite Centre of ISRO in Bengaluru and provides clean signatures of the sodium line with its high sensitivity and performance.

The need for mapping sodium on the Moon emerged from the lack of information about the element even after analysing the lunar samples brought to Earth during previous missions.

"Successive laboratory investigations of the returned samples (Apollo, Luna and Chang'E) widened the range of compositions but the fundamental conclusions have remained. However, the returned samples are from a few specific regions of the Moon which do not necessarily represent the global lunar composition," ISRO's statement read. "Sodium is one of those elements that do not have a telltale signature in the visible or near-infrared wavelengths and has thus not been targeted via remote sensing observations."

"The new findings from Chandrayaan-2, provide an avenue to study surface-exosphere interaction on the Moon, which would aid development of similar models for Mercury and other airless bodies in our Solar System and beyond," ISRO said in a statement.