According to a report, India has planned to launch its ambitious and maiden mission to the moon, Chandrayaan-I, on April 9, next year. The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is working hard to assimilate all the 11 necessary payload instruments on board the mission moon just before the end of the year 2007.

ISRO is likely to get six payloads instruments from the foreign partners to make the launch a great success. The report also said that the Chandrayaan-I would be launched from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre at Sriharikota as per the planned scheduled.

Mylswamy Annadurai, Project Director of Chandrayaan-I, said:

We are looking forward to launch Chandrayaan-I on April nine, 2008. The launch window will be available for the next two days if the launch does not happen on the scheduled date.

Annadurai further said that ISRO has integrated two payloads instruments, one from the US and one from Bulgaria, in the mission last week. These payloads, which have been integrated, were the moon mineralogy mapper.

These payloads were the joint project of Brown University and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Radiation Dose Monitor Experiment (Radom) from the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.

The other payload for the lunar orbiter such as the Miniature Synthetic Aperture Radar (mini-SAR) will be the joint project of Applied Physics Laboratory at the John Hopkins University and the Naval Air Warfare Centre, and SIR-2 from Germany’s Max Planck Institute.

The payload from Germany would be primarily integrated at ISRO’s Space Application Centre at Ahmedabad. After 15 days of that integration, it will be finally integrated with the main orbiter.

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