On Wednesday, India’s first lunar mission, Chandrayaan-I, will embark on a two-year-long journey around the moon. The Sunday Express looks at what this mission means for India

INDIA’S first moon mission is its boldest and most ambitious scientific endeavour. But is it really that big a deal, considering that such journeys were routinely made by satellites from the United States and the erstwhile Soviet Union almost half a century ago? Is the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) merely trying to reinvent the wheel? After all, there have been more than 65 missions to the moon, many of which made successful landings. Twelve astronauts have already walked on the surface of the earth’s natural satellite.
Mylswamy Annadurai, the mission director of Chandrayaan-I, puts things in perspective. Chandrayaan-I, he says, is not about reinventing the wheel but about working on the wheel to improve it.

There is a great qualitative difference between the lunar missions being undertaken now and the ones that were launched in the ’60s and the ’70s. There have been great leaps in technology in the last three decades and scientists have devised much better equipment to carry out their experiments. The goals of these lunar missions have also changed. The earlier expeditions were driven mainly by the urge to establish the technological supremacy of one superpower over the other, though these also resulted in a wealth of scientific data being collected. That sort of competition has now given way to collaboration. This is exemplified by the fact that six out of the 11 payloads on Chandrayaan-I are from foreign countries. The effort is to maximise the scientific yield from every expedition by sharing knowledge and skills.

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