India`s Chandrayaan programme is "ambitious"
Till 1999, India's space programme was focussed on application-driven projects. Sending satellites to space with an eye to immediate benefits. But that didn't mean that space scientists weren't nursing the desire to explore space from more of a pure science perspective.
At an annual meeting of the Indian Academy of Sciences (ias) in October 1999, a symposium was organised to discuss moon exploration, says V Adimurthy, whose team is designing the rocket for India's proposed lunar orbiter, Chandrayaan-1, slated to take off by 2008, at the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, Thiruvananthapuram. There was widespread support from the scientific community, despite the popular belief that the Apollo and Luna missions of the 1960s and early 1970s had gathered whatever information about the moon was needed. It was felt that an Indian mission would only "reinvent the wheel'. "This was a misconception, which got cleared because we could explain the gaps in the knowledge about the moon,' says Adimurthy.
Three missions in the 1990s