India’s next moon mission will be precursor to the country’s ambitious lunar sample return mission: PRL Director 

Anil Bharadwaj, director, Physical Research Laboratory, Ahmedabad during at public talk on moon explorations at Jawaharalal Nehru planetarium in Bengaluru on Wednesday.
| Photo Credit: BHAGYA PRAKASH K.

India’s next lunar mission LUPEX which will be launched in the next few years in collaboration with Japan will be a precursor to the country’s ambitious lunar sample return mission, said a top space scientist.

Anil Bharadwaj, director, Physical Research Laboratory (PRL), who delivered a public lecture on the Lunar Exploration Program of India on Wednesday said that LUPEX will be a precursor to ISRO’s lunar sample return mission and for sending the first Indian to the moon by 2040.

“In our previous lunar missions, we have already successfully demonstrated orbiting, landing and rovering. The next step is that we should bring something back from the moon. That is why we are participating in the LUPEX mission which is going to be very useful for future sampling missions and landing of humans on the surface of the moon by 2040,” Dr Bharadwaj said.

The Indo-Japanese LUPEX mission is envisaged to explore the permanently shadowed regions or the dark side of the moon.

The launch vehicle for the mission will be a Japanese rocket, the lander system will be developed by ISRO while the rover by Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), and its landing point will be the south pole of the moon.

“The plan is to land very close to the polar regions and go into deep shadowed regions which are called permanently shadowed regions where sunlight never reaches. We want to see what is there in these permanently shadowed regions. This will be a three to six months mission,” Dr. Bharadwaj said.

Dr. Bharadwaj added that all the scientific payloads onboard the Chandrayaan-3 mission have worked very well and have brought very good science data.