Indian Planetary Missions and Science

Abstract

The planetary exploration program in India started in the new millennium with the launch of Chandrayaan-1 orbiter mission to the Moon in 2008, which was a highly successful mission since it discovered water on the Moon. The next Indian planetary mission was to Mars: the Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM), launched in November 2013 and arriving on Mars in September 2014. The MOM planned for 6-month lifetime, is still in orbit and working after more than 7-years in Martian orbit with five science experiments onboard. The second India mission to Moon is the ongoing Chandrayaan-2 mission; the orbiter is working well and providing high-quality science data. India will be launching soon the Chandrayaan-3 Lander-Rover mission to study the Moon in-situ, and Aditya-L1 - a mission at L1 to study the Sun and solar processes. In near future India plans to have missions to Venus and a joint Indo-Japanese mission to the polar region of the Moon. This talk will discuss the Indian planetary missions, and highlight the science derived from them as well as using other complementary mission data. The new science results will be discussed, and future Indian planetary exploration program will be briefed.