British scientist looking forward to Chandrayaan launch

London, Oct 20 (PTI) A British scientist is eagerly
looking forward to the launch of India's first moon mission,
Chandrayaan-I, for which he designed a camera that will
photograph the moon's surface.

Chandrayaan is scheduled to be launched from Satish
Dhawan Space Centre at Sriharikota on October 22.

"It is going to be great. It has been a lot of work
but fingers crossed everything goes okay. I am busy trying to
get my travel arrangements sorted out to attend the launch in
India," said Manuel Grande, a professor at the Aberystwyth
University in Wales, who worked on the project since helping
to develop a prototype came for a European mission in 2003.

The camera on the current mission is of the size of a
toaster and which will be fixed onto a shelf of the unmanned
Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft.

The camera will photograph elements which may match
elements on Earth, said Grandem, who is the head of Solar
System Physics at the university's Institute of Mathematical
and Physical Sciences.

"The surface area of the moon is about the size of
Africa. What nobody knows is whether the Earth and moon were
formed together," said the 53-year-old scientist.

He said that in the early solar system's history there
may have been a massive collision between a planet like Mars
and the Earth causing debris to collect as the moon. Gravity
then pulled it into a sphere.

The camera can tell of what the moon is made of. Tests
will compare these elements with those on Earth to see if they
match.

"This will be new data. The moon is what the Earth
used to be like. It has not changed. It is frozen in time,"
Grande said. PTI CORR SMJ
BDS