23 Nov : Britain is set to launch its maiden moon mission to study the phenomenon of mysterious moonquakes, weeks after India’s spacecraft Chandrayaan-1 successfully entered the lunar orbit.
The 100-million-pound unmanned mission ‘MoonLITE’ would aim to understand the cause of mysterious quakes that vibrate through the lunar rock and put it into the satellite’s orbit before firing a series of probes into the moon’s surface, the newsaper reported on Sunday.
The report said that the launch of Moon Lightweight Interior and Telecommunications Experiment or MoonLITE, will be announced by science minister Lord Drayson next month after which engineers would work on the technical designs with an aim to launch the satellite between 2012 and 2014.
Backed by NASA, the spacecraft would also examine the chemical composition of the rocks and even search for water on the moon’s surface.
The existence of moonquakes has puzzled scientists as the moon does not have the tectonic plate activity that causes quakes on the earth.
"The moon still holds an awful lot of secrets. Most of what we know about the moon is from a relatively small area on the nearside of the moon and we have no samples or data from the far side," the daily quoted Ian Crawford, from the school of Earth sciences at Birkbeck College, University of London.
Crawford was one of the scientists who first proposed the MoonLITE mission, which would fire four suitcase-sized penetrator probes into different points around the lunar surface.
NASA’s Apollo mission had shown that there are several different types of moonquakes, some thought to be caused by earth’s gravitational pull on the moon and others which are caused by the expansion of rocks when heated by sunlight.
A third mysterious form of moonquake, which reach up to magnitude 5 on the Richter Scale, has raised the possibility that the moon may be geologically active just beneath its crust, the paper said.
"Knowing more about these moonquake events is quite important if we are going to build a lunar base that is susceptible to them…can withstand them," Crawford was quoted as saying.
Nasa has already announced plans to send astronauts back to the moon by 2020 and the agency is also aiming to build a permanent base on the lunar surface that could provide a staging post for future missions to Mars.
According to the daily, China and Russia are also planning missions to the moon, raising expectations of a new space race.