Lunar X Prize: TeamIndus on track for launch

BENGALURU: TeamIndus, the only Indian team competing for the Google Lunar X Prize, is on track for its December 28 launch this year. A panel of space scientists and eminent engineers who reviewed its mission plan confirmed on Thursday.

While the team has met some technical milestones, they are yet to meet others.The mission deadline set by Google is March 31, 2018. The team also unveiled its command station at its Jakkur office (from where the launch will be controlled) for the media for the first time.

The five-day review by the panel included demonstrations of the mission hardware — the qualification models of the spacecraft and the moon rover ECA as well as a simulation of the mooncast. Rahul Narayan, founder and fleet commander, TeamIndus said, “We are looking at three launch windows, first launch date being December 28. If we miss that, the second window is in February first week. Worst case scenario, we may launch between March 6-8.”  

Despite an early launch, only the team to first relay videos and pictures of the moon after traversing 500 metres on Moon will win the grand prize of $30 million.
Team Indus will become the first privately funded entity to land on the Moon, on Republic Day, January 26, 2018, if everything goes according to plan.  

“Our mission cost is `450 crore and we have raised half of it so far. We are having multiple conversations with venture capitalists. For any startup this is pretty decent,” Narayan said.

Couldn’t have asked Haley’s Comet to hang on!

Google has extended the deadline thrice since it first fixed the deadline for December 2012. On being asked if it will do it again, Prof John Zarnecki, one of the judges recalled his work on the Giotto mission that flew past Halley’s comet in 1985 and said, “The comet comes only once in 76 years. While working for Giotto mission we couldn’t have asked the comet to hang on for a few more days if we missed
the deadline. I don’t think X Prize competitors deadline is stricter than that.”