ISRO Releases Chandrayaan-2 Mission’s Initial Data

The Indian Space Research Organisation has recently released the 1st set of data from the Chandrayaan-2 for the general public. Chandrayaan-2 was the first mission of India to land on the moon.

Key Points

• Chandrayaan-2, the country’s 2nd mission to the Moon, was launched from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre at Sriharikota on 22 July 2019.
• The Orbiter was injected into a lunar orbit on 2 September 2019 and it carries 8 experiments to provide answers to various open lunar science questions.
• The public release data is prepared as per the globally followed PDS4 (Planetary Data System 4) format for a public release. The data is archived at the Bylalu’s Indian Space Science Data Centre (near Bengaluru).
• The nodal centre of a planetary data archive for ISRO’s planetary missions is the Indian Space Science Data Centre (ISSDC).
• The first set of data from the Chandrayaan-2 has been released through the PRADAN portal hosted by ISSDC.
• At present, the ISRO Science Data Archive (ISDA) has the data sets acquired by Chandrayaan-2 payloads from September 2019 to February 2020 from 7 instruments.
• Data sets from the Imaging Infra-Red Spectrometer (IIRS) payload will be added shortly.
• Chandrayaan-1 was sent in October 2008.

ISRO

It is the national space research agency of India and is headquartered at Bengaluru, Karnataka. It was established in the year 1969. It works under the Department of Space.