Team Indus

Location

Axiom Research Labs Pvt. Ltd., the private company set up with the primary mission of landing a spacecraft on the moon before December 2017, is based in Bengaluru. The company's office is minimalistic and betrays no external signs of the nature of its business. The office is divided into “Bhaskara Block”, “Aryabhatta Block” and “CV Raman Block”. Axiom Research Labs employs nearly 85 engineers and around 12 retired ISRO scientists, who are part of TeamIndus - the only team from India to qualify for the Google Lunar X Prize.

Partners

1. InMobi

2. Flipkart

3. Zomato

4. Tata Communications

5. Firstsource

6. Delhivery

7. Yodlee

8. Sasken

9. Inventure Academy

10. Aspire Systems

11. Canadian International School

Mission

The TeamIndus team initially planned to attempt the endurance and distance bonus prizes. To accomplish the same, they reckon on designing a lunar lander and two rovers. The two rovers together are planned to have a mass of around 15 kg. One rover will compete for the main task i.e. to travel more than 500 meters on the lunar surface and send feedback to the earth. The other rover will compete for the US$5 million worth prize by completing additional tasks beyond baseline requirements to win grand or the second place prize, such as survival and range. However the plans were later modified .

The spacecraft is envisaged to transport the two rovers in the lunar lander from earth's surface to orbit around the moon. The lunar lander will be the primary communication and control center and will also absorb the lunar touchdown impact.

The original plan for the launch date was 2014, in 2016 a launch contract for a launch in 2017 was secured. The mission to the moon is planned as a Launch - Coast - Burn - Direct Lunar Descent trajectory. TeamIndus plans at launching the rovers by PSLV (Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle) operated by ISRO - Indian Space Research Organisation, for which the proposal has been made. The planned mission duration is 30 earth days. The mass at launch is approximated at 900 kg and total Lunar payload mass is approximated at 40 kg.

TeamIndus Lunar Lander code named HHK1 is envisioned as a universal airless body landing platform. The team plans at further modification of the HHK1 for other terrestrial and inter-stellar application after the Google Lunar X Prize is over. For the present mission the HHK1 is the main communication and control unit consisting of Payload, Propulsion, Structural and other sub-systems.

In 2013, TeamIndus moved from Delhi to Bangalore due to the strategic location of the city, which is nicknamed as the Silicon Valley of India. ISRO is based in Bangalore and is crucial to the future plans of the team since the team needs a commercial launch vehicle. Furthermore, the state capital has also excellent aerospace companies that can help the team with building the lander and rover. L&T is helping by reviewing designs, Sasken has given space in its Bangalore facility for the team to operate out of and several former ISRO scientists are providing advice. The mission life is expected to be 21 days.

In January, 2017 Google Lunar X Prize foundation announced Team Indus's place in final five teams.

Launch

Team Indus contracted a PSLV-XL, an expendable launch system of Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) for launch. In November 2016, they signed a deal with Antrix Corporation, the commercial arm of ISRO for a undisclosed amount, to provide them a launch on 28 December 2017. Later in December 2016, the GLXP conformed launch contract of Team Indus making them the fourth team to do so.

Team Indus After lifting off from the Bangalore launch facility, the rocket will insert the Team Indus spacecraft into an elliptical transfer orbit. The spacecraft will then be on its own to embark on a 21-day journey to the Moon. They have a proven rocket, the Indian PSLV will carry Team Indus’ mission to the Moon (through the Indian Space Research Organisation/ISRO’s private wing) from the famed launch site, Sriharikota. Amongst all teams of GLXP only Team Indus have been able to contract a rocket which has been to moon previously, two of four competitors of Team Indus have their rockets in development stage.

ISRO have made it clear that they would ferry Team Indus only if it is worth it. The final version of the rover will be tested by ISRO and lastly at the Sriharikota launch centre.

Landing

Team Indus have a lander named HHK-1 , for demonstrating its landing technology, TeamIndus has already won a $1-million terrestrial milestone prize as part of the competition.

The craft will enter a 70,000-km orbit from a height of 880 km and circle the Earth 2.5 times.Each orbit will spiral the craft another 10,000 km away from the earth before executing a TLI — Translunar Injection — to escape the planet’s gravity and send it speeding at 10.3 km/second for a week toward the moon, where it will slow down once within 100 km of the surface.The landing site for the TeamIndus moon mission is Mare Imbrium, a vast lava plain. In this region, the lunar soil is loose and moving on it is a tricky proposition.

The spacecraft of Team Indus, HHK-1, is designed to carry a payload of about 30 kg. The team is committed to carry its rover ECA along with a special package, which would be given by Google Lunar X Prize weighing 1 kg. Later Team Indus announced that they would ferry other teams of GLXP as well as other private bodies to recover some amount of the money paid for the launch contract.

Imaging

In July, it was announced that the Team Indus craft would carry a new line of state-of-art cameras for France's national space agency CNES. Unlike Hakuto, that was not a commercial contract though. CNES gets to test its cameras, while Team Indus gets cameras that it needs for the mission. For testing imaging section, they would create a facility where the sun angles and luminosity will be replicated. Obstacle negotiation would be tested in open fields or lake beds with strategically placed rocks,

On 9 January 2017 CNES and Team Indus inked the deal to carry micro-cameras to the Moon. The deal, which was initially announced back in July last year, was signed at the TeamIndus headquarters, graced with the presence of French Minister of Foreign Affairs Mr. Jean-Marc Ayrault, President of CNES Mr. Jean-Yves Le Gall and H.E. Mr. Alexander Ziegler. The French space agency is delighted to partner with a young innovative space exploration company from India.

Mobility

TeamIndus' lunar spacecraft and rover, named ECA for 'Ek Choti si Asha' (a small dream).

The all aluminium, four wheel drive, all terrain rover – codenamed ECA . Her role in the mission is to move at least 500 m and help capture high definition images from the surface of the Moon. Weighing in at around 5 kg, ECA the explorer will be powered by solar energy harnessed from photo voltaic panels arranged on its back. It will house a variety of equipment including cameras from the French Space Agency CNES. Designed and developed by TeamIndus, every part of ECA, including the wheels have undergone rigorous testing on simulated lunar conditions back in TeamIndus HQ.ECA will be one of the lightest rovers ever to roam the lunar surface and many technological highlights including an extremely light weight mechanism on the wheels which helps it ride over the toughest of lunar conditions without a suspension adding to the weight of the rover.

Compensating for lunar soil, TeamIndus engineers filled a 15-feet by 12-feet box-pit-like installation with 16 tonnes of pale white dust sourced from the plentiful stone quarries nearby. It's in this pit that the team will test the most crucial component of its lunar rover — locomotion on the moon's highly unpredictable surface. They chose quarry dust because it comes the closest to imitating the moon's surface. The 150-micron filtered and dried stone dust is used because its properties are as close as they can get to lunar regolith (a layer of loose soil and dust) in terms of cohesion. The depth of the testing surface is to simulate a structure similar to the lunar terrain-top — 150-300 mm of loose soil followed by thick and rigid rock. The simulation pit helps validate and characterise the rover's wheel and suspension system design, and freeze the team's locomotion strategies.While the moon's surface can be imitated to a certain extent, simulating lunar gravity on earth is a more flummoxing challenge. The team overcame this by tying a giant helium balloon to ECA.

Communication

Once the spacecraft touches down, it will first connect back to Earth, deploy the rover, and beam back high definition lunar images. The process of controlling and communicating with the team’s space-based vehicle is spearheaded by Tata Communications, a decade-old leader in landline and cellular communications across India. Tata currently controls the vehicle on Earth, but ensuring instantaneous and consistent communication between the Earth and the moon is certainly a unique challenge for the telecommunications company.

Mr Vinod Kumar, Managing Director, Tata Communications Limited, has magnanimously extended support & services of his organization for low-latency global connectivity, seamless data transfer, high-performance computing systems and much more — eventually supporting DSN connectivity, high priority data delivery for the big one.

Agreement with Team Hakuto

On 20 December 2016, Team Hakuto, a fellow contestant of GLXP announced to launch their rover Moonraker in the with Team Indus's HHTA ,though Team Hakuto had previously designed their mission to carry two rovers, the other one being called Tetris, tethered to each other. It was expected that Moonraker would transmit images while Tetris would explore the lunar craters, fulfilling the optional science mission set out by the GLXP council. HAKUTO had also signed a collaboration with another team, Astrobotic, but which has since pulled out of the competition. As there has been no mention or design release of a second rover – or any update on their website – it would be fair to conclude that Moonraker is the only rover that will attempt to land on the Moon .

Agreement with Indian Centre for Space Physics

A week later, Team Indus announced that they further carry an experimental probe of Indian Centre for Space Physics(ICSP). Sandip Kumar Chakrabarti, head of the Indian Center for Space Physics in Kolkata, told a group of journalists the probe will weigh four kilograms and be installed on top of Team Indus‘s lunar lander, scheduled to touch down in December 2017. The Kolkata probe will include an X-ray detector and four computers that will study outer space from the lunar surface, something that Chakrabarti emphasizes has never been done before. Since GLXP are also offering $5 million for verifiable discoveries on the lunar surface, that could make the Kolkata project critical for the team’s notoriety and its finances.

Agreement with Indian Institute of Astrophysics

Lunar Ultraviolet Cosmic Imager (LUCI), an instrument to scan the sky in near-UV wavelengths is developed by researchers from Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA), headed by IIA senior Prof Jayant Murthy.

LUCI is an innovative all-spherical mirrors telescope expected to be deployed as part of the lander on the lunar surface. No other UV payloads have been previously reported with an all-spherical optical design for imaging in the NUV domain and a weight below 2 kg; actual LUCI weight is ~1 kg. An electronics board which includes FPGA and Microcontroller is used for the data acquisition, processing, and CCD control. LUCI will observe at a fixed elevation angle and will detect stars in the near-UV (200–320 nm) to a limiting magnitude of 12 and with a field of view of ~ 28' × 20'. The primary science goal is to search for transient sources and flag them for further study.

Lab2Moon

TeamIndus held a Lab2Moon competition, a global challenge for students under 25 years of age to imagine, design and build a project that could accelerate human evolution into a sustainable multi planetary species, the company said in a statement.More than 3000 teams from all over the world participated in it. Three basic rules must be followed-

1.The Project Must be about Size Of A Regular Soda Can

2.The Project Must Weigh Less Than 250 Grams

3.The Project Must: Connect To On-Board Computer

In January 2017,Team Indus shortlisted 25 ideas ,in its bid to find suitable experiments to fly aboard its lunar spacecraft scheduled for launch in 2017. These included experiment seeks to study photosynthesis on the Moon, and yet another proposes brewing beer to study yeast formation, another that will explore water recycling in space by using the electrocoagulation effect and filters on urine, yet another that will try to find out if cosmic radiation on the lunar surface can be used to generate electricity. The shortlisted entries come from several countries including India, Peru, Italy, United States, United Kingdom, Spain and Mexico .The shortlisted teams were each been assigned mentors from TeamIndus, each of whom will work closely with the teams to ensure that the standards needed for space grade experiments are observed and maintained .

The winning experiments were announced on 15 March 2017.An eminent international jury comprising Dr. K Kasturirangan, former chairman of Indian Space Research Organisation, Dr. Alain Bensoussan, Former President of Centre National D'Etudes Spatiales (CNES) and Former Chairman of Council, European Space Agency and Dr. Priyamvada Natarajan, Professor in the Departments of Astronomy and Physics at Yale University, will examine the experiments in further detail over the next few months before the teams fly down to Bangalore in March to showcase their final prototype to the jury.

Internshala, India’s largest internship platform signed up with TeamIndus as exclusive college outreach partners helping TeamIndus spread the word on Lab2Moon across campuses in India.Lab2Moon is shaping up to be the new space race and all the excitement including details of each of the teams and their experiments are available on lab2moon.teamindus.in.

Selected teams

A total of 8 teams have been deemed to be worthy to fly to moon , however , Team Indus is committed to fly only the first and second position holders . Rest 6 are grouped together as qualified teams and Team Indus would fly them if they get sponsors. Further,the main challenge for the team now is to obtain funds of Rs 4 crore by April 15 to send their project.

Name Plaque on Moon

TeamIndus, a space start-up based in Bengaluru, has proposed an opportunity to its donors to leave their name on moon. For this purpose, people will have to pay Rs 500.As per the plan, names of the donors will be micro-engraved on a small-sized aluminium object and placed on the lunar surface which will land on the moon on January 26, 2018.

As per Sheelika Ravishankar, Marketing and Outreach of TeamIndus, the plan is part of a crowd-funding effort. As per reports, some 10,000 people have sent their names for the project.

Moonshot Wheels

TeamIndus started an initiative of teaching rural students about the space missions and its lunar landing program that will kick off by the end of 2017. The company collaborated with Agastya International Foundation and has started a bus named Moonshot Wheels.

Tata Group patriarch Ratan Tata launched TeamIndus Foundation’s ‘Moonshot Wheels’ on 7 February 2017– a bus which will traverse the country with an aim to inspire the next generation about India’s first private moon mission.

The Moonshot Wheels go in 11 states withing next 12 months where it will cover a distance of over 12500 km. According to the estimates by TeamIndus, the mission will be able to interact with over 36,000 students in government schools and will teach them about space exploration. The bus contains 16 experiments including live satellite tracking, models of spacecraft, Lunar rover, and several other science wonders. Members of TeamIndus believe that such an initiative will ignite fire among young students towards science and research which will eventually help India in producing future space scientists.

“Moonshot Wheels is an important manifestation of our commitment to making this Mission, #HarIndianKaMoonshot,” Rahul Narayan, Fleet Commander of TeamIndus, said in a statement. “Our foundation will continue initiatives like this and Lab2Moon to ignite passion for STEM in the next generation,” he added.

Ramji Raghavan, Founder and Chairman of Agastya International Foundation, said that the organisation is happy to partner with the Indian space startup in such an initiative which is targetted towards the students studying in government schools.