A Brown professor's research equipment is on its way to the moon as part of India's first-ever lunar mission. Carle Pieters, professor of geological sciences, is the principal investigator for one of 11 projects with an instrument on board a recently launched Indian rocket that will orbit and investigate the moon.
India's mission, carried out by the Chandrayaan-1 rocket, was developed with foreign support, including from the United States.
Pieters' research team also includes former undergraduates, geological sciences doctoral student Peter Isaacson GS and James Head '69 and Jack Mustard '90, both professors of geological sciences.
The team started the process of constructing the instrument, known as a moon mineralogy mapper, after their proposal was selected for funding by NASA in February 2005.
The device is a spectrometer that detects 260 different colors, most of which are at longer wavelengths than the human eye can see.
The spectrometer captures an image of the moon's surface, which the team will use to identify the mineral composition of the landscape based on the colors the device detects.
Most of the spectrometer's construction took place at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, with the Brown team making sure it met reasonable scientific specifications.
The team will now wait to analyze the data the rocket will send back when it begins orbiting the moon on Nov. 8.
With Chandrayaan-1, India joins the growing ranks of countries that have sent missions to the moon. Countries that have launched lunar investigations recently include the U.S. and China. "As a scientist, I'm looking forward, in the next 10 years, with great enthusiasm to the large feast of lots of different measurements (to come) from the moon," Pieters said.
"Everything is digital now, and standards have developed to make it easy" to exchange scientific data, she added, making it easier to share knowledge about the composition, origin and revolution of the moon.
