Thales Alenia Space to Provide Integrated Transponder for a Moon Mission

Thales Alenia Space has been chosen by TeamIndus to provide the Integrated S-Band Transponder on board its Lunar Landing Spacecraft system for transmitting video and images from the Rover. TeamIndus is building a privately-funded spacecraft which it hopes will soft-land on the moon by December 2017. It is run by Axiom Research Labs, an aerospace startup from Bengaluru, India which is one of the five finalists in the Google Lunar XPrize (GLXP) competition. 

It is the only Indian team competing for the Google Lunar XPRIZE. The $30M Google Lunar XPRIZE is a global competition to challenge and inspire engineers and entrepreneurs to develop low-cost methods of robotic space exploration. To win, a privately funded team must successfully place a robot on the Moon that explores at least 500 meters and transmits high-definition video and images back to Earth.

The TeamIndus spacecraft is designed to deliver a 20 kg payload to the Moon’s surface, and it relies upon robust subsystems for its flight and surface operations. They have signed a commercial launch contract with Antrix Corporation for a PSLV launch vehicle and had previously won a $1 Million Terrestrial milestone prize recognizing its technical maturity and progress.

Publisher: everything RF
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