HYDERABAD: India's second mission to the moon Chandrayaan 2, which is proposed to kick off next year, will launch a spacecraft using a Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV) unlike Chandrayaan-I which utilised a Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV), project director Mylswamy Annadurai said.
The mission will consist of the spacecraft and a landing platform with the moon rover.
The rover would move on wheels on the lunar surface, pick up samples of soil or rocks, do a chemical analysis and send the data to the spacecraft orbiting above.
Delivering a special lecture on 'Chandrayaan: Message from the Moon' as part of the 150th birth anniversary celebration of Swamy Vivekananda at the Ramakrishna Math here on Saturday, Annadurai said that the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) would develop the lander that will carry the rover to explore the moon's surface as part of the mission.
As Chandrayaan-1 had confirmed the presence of water as ice on the moon, the Chandrayaan-2 will be equipped with a varieties of payloads and instruments to probe the surface even more closely, he said, adding that the second moon mission will have more indigenous components.
But the payloads carried by Chandrayaan-II would not be as many as Chandrayaan-I.
Annadurai told students gathered for the lecture that the purpose of Chandrayaan-I was to understand what the moon was made of. Asking youth to strive for success despite any odds, he said that the Chandrayaan-1 mission had proved anything could be done.
Quoting Swamy Vivekananda, he said that any noble effort is first laughed at, then opposed but finally accepted. He said that people had initially ridiculed the Chandrayaan1 project saying that all major countries had already spent billions on their moon mission and that no new objective could be achieved with the mission.
But India persisted and was the first to identify water on the moon.
Citing this as an example, Annadurai asked the youth to grab the opportunities that come their way and said small ideas lead to improvements and then to big things like it happened in the moon mission.
Eminent (retd) ISRO scientist TGK Murthy, vicechancellor of Mahatma Gandhi University, Nalgonda, K Narasimha Reddy, Ramakrishna Math Adhyaksha Swami Jnanadananda also spoke.