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India, U.S. sign pact for moon mission

NEW DELHI, May 9 (UPI) -- India and the United States have signed a space cooperation pact that will see India's unmanned moon mission Chandrayan-I carrying two U.S. payloads on board.

The mission will be launched by early 2007.

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The Hindu newspaper said Wednesday that G. Madhavan Nair, India's Space Research Organization chief, and NASA Administrator Michael Griffin signed the pact.

"The payloads are miniature synthetic aperture radar that will map the cold region and scan for ice deposits, and a moon mineralogy mapper," a statement from ISRO said, adding that the applied physics laboratory of Johns Hopkins University, with funding from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, had developed the mini synthetic aperture radar. Brown University and NASA's jet propulsion laboratory built the moon mineralogy mapper.

"The two-year mission will map the lunar surface and investigate its properties that would advance knowledge about the moon's history and evolution, besides informing future exploration decisions by characterizing the content of the lunar soil," Griffin said.

"The mission, ... conducted some 40 years after humans saw the moon up close for the first time, will greatly advance our understanding of our closest neighbor in space and represents a very impressive technical achievement," he added.

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"I understand that you are undertaking this mission to upgrade India's technological capability and provide challenging opportunities for planetary research for the younger generation."

Director of ISRO's physical research laboratory, Y.N. Goswami, said the mission's main objective was to investigate the mineral and chemical distribution of the lunar surface.

"Our mission will, for the first time, explore the topography of the moon. It is important to know, as once a manned mission is there, we should know where humans should go," he said.

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