Chandrayaan found water on Moon’s surface

There were indications on September 22, 2009 that India’s maiden Moon mission Chandrayaan-1 found water on the lunar surface before the project was aborted. An announcement about a ‘‘major discovery’’ made by Chandrayaan-I is expected on September 24, and the buzz is that this could be about water on the Moon. If true, credit for this much-awaited discovery, however, could go to Nasa’s Moon Minerology Mapper (M3), one of the payloads on board Chandrayaan. The Rs 386-crore craft was launched on October 22 last year and terminated on August 30 following a communication failure. One of the mission’s main goals was to sniff for water. For now, neither Isro nor Nasa is speaking about the discovery. An announcement is expected at a media interaction scheduled for September 22 at the Nasa headquarters in Washington DC featuring well-known lunar scientist Carle Pieters from Brown University. She is the principal investigator for M3.