NASA and India Join Forces on Mission to the Moon

May 16, 2006 — -- Last week's announcement that NASA would be contributing resources to an Indian spaceflight to orbit the moon may have surprised many who remember the space race as a matter of national pride. To the chief scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, however, the cooperation makes perfect sense.

"I think this is the evolution of well-informed partnerships," Jim Garvin said. "We can't all do everything, and the moon is an important gateway to deep space."

The plan is to put two NASA scientific devices onto an unmanned Indian mission to the moon. According to Garvin, it complements perfectly NASA's own plans to revisit Earth's closest neighbor.

"The Indian mission will help us understand our data. Our mission will help them understand their data," he said.

The announcement formalized a plan that had been openly considered since Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh visited Washington last summer. It comes at a time of increased international cooperation in space exploration, which in decades past was a matter of closely guarded secrets.

Garvin chalks up that change to the realization among formerly competitive space programs that there is enough for everyone to study.

"There are oodles of great questions left that are still conundrums," he said.

Garvin describes India's first trip to the moon as a "great science mission."

The two American devices will travel the nearly 240,000 miles to the moon aboard Chandrayaan-1, India's first lunar mission. The data they will bring back fulfill practical NASA goals, and will be a boon to raw science -- the gathering of information for information's sake.

One device, the Moon Mineralogy Mapper -- which NASA internally calls "M Cubed" -- will provide insight into what minerals make up the rocks on the moon, and how those rocks were formed.

"From this we will be able to tell a lot about the geology of the moon, and the Earth as well, because the moon was once part of the Earth," said Tom Glavich, the project manager for the Mapper, who works at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, Calif.