Chandrayaan-2 orbiter paves the way for future lunar exploration and eventually the larger global scientific community.
India’s ambitious Chandrayaan-2 moon mission launched by the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) in July 2019 may have made a hard landing on the lunar surface.
However, its orbiter accompanying it remains functional and provides helpful information to scientists back on Earth.
And one of the significant findings of India’s Chandrayaan-1 mission was to detect water molecules on the Moon’s surface.
The orbiter’s imaging infrared spectrometer (IIRS) made this discovery. The scientists said that more data would be made available in the future, giving a complete picture.
“Plagioclase-rich rocks have found to have higher OH or possibly H2O molecules when compared to the mare regions, which also found to have more dominance of OH at higher surface temperature,” the group of researchers who studied the IIRS data further said.
A probe onboard India’s Chandrayaan-2 orbiter (second lunar mission) has validated the breakthrough by its predecessor and paved the way for future lunar exploration.
According to ISRO scientists associated with both Lunar projects, the data received from the Chandrayaan-2 would be helpful to build a lunar water map, which would further aid upcoming missions to the Moon.
The primary purpose of the launch of Chandrayaan-2 is to map the variations in lunar surface composition and locate and study the Moon’s surface for water.
And Isro stated that the Chandrayaan-2 orbiter, with its eight scientific instruments, will continue its seven-year mission to study the surface of the Moon.
