Chandrayaan-1 to now launch in late September

Bangalore: The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has again pushed back the launch date of the nation's first lunar orbiter to late September. According to ISRO spokesman S Satish, this is in part due to the late arrivals of payloads.

This is the second postponement this year for the Chandrayaan-1 mission, which was originally was scheduled to lift off 9 April, and was pushed back to early July to allow for extra time needed for integrating experimental payloads with the spacecraft.

ISRO's Satish said that the decision to postpone the mission to September was taken on 27 May at one of the regular technical progress review meetings of the project. He said delays in some of the orbiter's international payloads were largely responsible, declining to provide more details.

Additionally, he said that there were "unforeseen" problems in interfacing the payloads with the spacecraft, adding that those problems have now been overcome, and that "everything is under control." He said that presently, all payloads have been integrated and testing is in progress at the ISRO Satellite Centre in Bangalore.

The end-September launch date will also allow ISRO sufficient time to gain complete confidence in the performance of the deep space network antenna built specifically for tracking Chandrayaan-1. The 32-meter parabolic dish antenna set up at Byalalu, 40 kilometers from Bangalore is presently undergoing tests by tracking the Japanese lunar probe Kaguya that was launched last September, with the formal consent of the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency.

The 525-kilogram Chandrayaan-1 will lift off in a modified version of ISRO's Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) from the Sriharikota launch pad on India's east coast.

Five of the probe's 11 experimental payloads have been built by Indian scientists. International payloads include an X-ray spectrometer, atom reflecting analyzer, and an infrared camera that have all been supplied in cooperation with the European Space Agency, A miniature synthetic aperture radar and moon mineralogical mapper originate from the United States, and a radiation dose monitor comes aboard from Bulgaria.