Chandrayaan gives first glimpse of moon's darkest craters
New York: India's first unmanned moon mission, Chandrayaan-1, is providing scientists with the first look inside the moon's coldest and darkest craters, US space agency NASA has said. The NASA radar on board the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft has sent back its first images which "show the floors of permanently-shadowed polar craters on the moon that aren't visible from Earth," NASA said in a press release. "Scientists are using the instrument to map and search the insides of the craters for water ice," it said. The NASA radar is a Mini-SAR (Mini Synthetic Aperture Radar) instrument, a lightweight, synthetic aperture radar. It is one of the 11 instruments carried by Chandrayaan which blasted off from Sriharikota spaceport in India's Andhra Pradesh state Oct 22, 2008. "The only way to explore such areas is to use an orbital imaging radar such as Mini-SAR," said Benjamin Bussey, deputy principal investigator for Mini-SAR, from the Johns Hopkins Univ...