The Indian space program has announced plans to launch an un-piloted spacecraft to the moon in 2005.
The mission, said Rajeev Lochan, a space counselor at the Indian Embassy in Washington, will be submitted to the country's space council, which oversees the space program, in the coming months. It will later require approval from the prime minister and parliament.
India would be the fourth country to send a spacecraft to the moon, joining Russia, the United States and Japan.
While the scientific value of another mission to the moon might be limited considering that probes have been exploring Earth's satellite since the 1950s, the mission would undoubtedly be a mark of prestige for India. In 1998, India joined an elite club of nuclear powers after detonating its own nuclear bomb in a test.
"As a motivator, it will electrify the nation," Krishnaswamy Kasturirangan, director of the Indian Space Research Organization, said in an interview with India Today , which reports the announcement in its July 3 issue. "If we go ahead, it will demonstrate to the world that India is capable of taking up a complex mission that is at the cutting edge of space."
A modified Indian rocket, called the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV), would deliver into lunar orbit a small spacecraft that would spend several years studying the moon with reflectometers, spectrometers and cameras, according to India Today. The mission would cost around $77.8 million, the magazine says.
A mission to the moon would be India's first foray into deep-space exploration. Since the Indian space program began in 1972, its primary mission has been to put up communications, weather and mapping satellites.
More prestige than science
While Indian scientists could possibly make use of extra data from the moon, some analysts say the mission's primary purpose is to gain a cachet among the world's space powers.
"I think the significance of it has much more to do with India using space for prestige purposes rather than for the science of it," said John Pike, a policy analyst at the Federation of American Scientists. "It shows that they're a big country and that they're rich enough to do things they don't have to do."
And while India vehemently insists that its space program is completely civilian controlled, Pike suggested that the mission could provide a further test of India's ability to build an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).
"The core solid (-fuel) rocket motor on the PSLV would undoubtedly be the rocket motor that they would use to build an ICBM," Pike said. However, that motor was successfully tested in a launch of the PSLV in 1999.
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