October 1, 2007	Monday	Ramazan 18, 1428

HYDERABAD (India): Spacefaring nations are accelerating their quest to solve the mysteries of the moon, 35 years after the last human landing, and use it as a springboard to explore planets beyond.

Lunar missions dominated the international astronautics congress in Hyderabad, southern India, where 2,500 delegates gathered for five days ending on Friday, to discuss inter-planetary space travel.

The US wants to revisit the moon by 2020, and Japan, China and India are firming up their own plans to land astronauts on the earth’s only natural satellite, after a string of exploratory robotic missions.

“We are just starting and are conservative but we have a very clear roadmap for lunar exploration,” Jitendra Goswami, the chief scientist of the Indian moon programme, told AFP here.

India’s first robotic mission next year, budgeted at $100 million, will be followed by a second in 2012, Goswami said. The dates for a manned mission will be announced next year.

Japan, which spent $ 478 million launching a lunar orbiter in September, plans to carry out two more missions and collaborate internationally to put a man on the moon, space scientist Manabu Kato said.

China’s plans include setting up a lunar base after 2020, capping a series of robotic missions beginning at the end of 2007 and a human landing, said Ji Wu, director of China’s Centre for Space Science and Applied Research.

The US Apollo programme resulted in the only manned spaceflights to the moon, with six landings from 1969 to 1972.
Yet the moon, at a distance of about 380,000km from Earth, remains a puzzle to scientists, with questions persisting about its origin, the minerals it contains and whether it has water to support human life. “There is renewed interest from the scientific community to look at the moon from close quarters and understand it better,” said G. Madhavan Nair, chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).

“They are trying to look for basic signatures of the evolution of planet earth,” Nair added. “Secondly, they want to explore the terrain, the minerals available there, in what quantities, and whether they are commercially exploitable.” it’s premature to talk about exploiting them, experts say.

The US wants to return to the moon, via the international space station being built in low-Earth orbit, and use it for missions to Mars and beyond.—AFP