Tuesday, May 9 2006 12:08 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

Bangalore: Indian Space Research Organisation and National Aeronautics and Space Administration of the US today (May 9, 2006) signed a Memorandum of Understanding on the inclusion of two US scientific instruments on board India's mission to the Moon 'Chandrayaan-1'.

The MoU was signed by ISRO Chairman G Madhavan Nair and NASA Administrator Michael Griffin at the ISRO Satellite Centre here.

The two instruments are Mini Synthetic Aperture Radar developed by Applied Physics Laboratory, Johns Hopkins University and funded by NASA and Moon Minerology Napper jointly built by Brown University and Jet Propulsion Laboratory of NASA.

The US instruments were selected on the basis of merits of 16 firm proposals from all over the world received in response to ISRO's announcement of opportunity, ISRO said.

'Chandrayaan-1', scheduled for 2007-2008, is India's first unmanned scientific mission to the Moon.

The main objective of Mini FAR is to detect water in the permanently shadowed areas of Lunar-Polar region while that of Napper is characterisation and mapping of minerals on the lunar surface.