Mars Mission Energizes Indian Startup to Eye Moon Mission


BANGALORE: It’s not been long that the excitement of the Mar's Orbiter Mission have subsided, that there is another space mission that is quietly taking shape and could potentially set benchmarks, including cost benchmarks, in India's space odyssey reports Economic Times.

A Team named Indus, comprising of a diverse bunch of around 50 youngsters, are ready with a fully-functional prototype of its robotic rover for a Moon Mission, and is in the process of integrating the engineering model of the lander. The three-year-old Bangalore-based startup is the only team from India in the Google Lunar XPrize, a global competition to land a privately-funded robotic spacecraft on the Moon by December 2015. Till now, Moon landings have been largely government funded.

On September 29, an expert panel chaired by former ISRO chief and Padma Shri recipient K Kasturirangan did a complete tech review of the mission. "We came out with flying colours in that review," says an excited Julius Amrit, co-founder of Team Indus.He explains: "We have had a series of reviews, component by component, by expert panels, and after each review we went back to the drawing board. But the tech-review that happened on September 29 was a full mission review, where every component of the project was reviewed thread bare."