'Our baby has done its job'

“The baby has done its job by helping us find water on the moon,” Annadurai, project director of Chandrayaan-1, said. The mooncraft was coined ‘baby’ by its main architect Annadurai when it was successfully launched on October 22.

Terming the discovery of water molecules by the moon mineralogy mapper (M3) of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as one of the milestones of the mission, Annadurai said the scientific feat was a landmark event in international space cooperation between India and other countries.

“It is one of the milestones. We have to quantify it. It was a combined team effort. Finding presence of water or ice has been one of the mission’s scientific objectives apart from terrain mapping and mineral mapping,” Annadurai recalled. He hinted that more dramatic findings from the moon mission would be published in international scientific journals later.

“This is only the first paper. We had 11 payloads (scientific instruments) on board Chandrayaan-1. We expect more such papers to be published in the coming weeks and months about the experiments conducted by the instruments.”