It takes a lot of calibre to stand out in a crowd, and kudos to this city-based startup Team Indus for being one of the five shortlisted teams for the Google Lunar X Prize which carries a whopping prize money of $30 million.
The task of the teams shortlisted for the prize is to safely land a robot on Moon by the end of 2015. For the Indian entry in the competition, this team is going to launch a rover on I's work horse Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle.
To be adjunct to this rover will be an ultraviolet telescope Lunar Ultraviolet Cosmic Imager (LUCI). This instrument which will be a wide field UV imager to scan the sky in UV wavelength is being developed by researchers from the city-based Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA), headed by IIA senior Prof Jayant Murthy. The IIA team bagged the spot to be part of this mission by edging out several other institutions in the country.
"Observations from the Moon provide a unique opportunity to observe the sky from a stable platform far above the Earth's atmosphere. We are now in a collaboration to send an ultraviolet telescope – LUCI – to the lunar surface from where it will perform a survey of the sky, primarily to search for transients," Joice Mathew a member of the IIA team told dna.
The primary science from this payload is to scan the sky looking for transients of a number of different types such as supernovae, novae and more exotic sources such as hyper novae or bursts from planets falling into stars, Mathew added.
That apart the regular goal would be primarily to look for faint asteroids and comets in the Solar System, especially for Near Earth Objects (NEO) and Potential Hazardous Asteroids (PHA).
The IIA team said that one of the key challenges would be to not only make the instrument compact but to ensure that it can carry out its tasks in varying temperatures of the Moon. Mathew said that team has already finalised the optical and mechanical designs of the instrument and that it would be assembled by September 2015, three months before Team Indus's rover is launched.
