New Delhi: India has begun assembling the spacecraft for Chandrayan-I, its first unmanned mission to the moon scheduled for 2008, a top space agency said on Wednesday.
"We have begun the integration process for the spacecraft structure and are putting in place the antennae required for tracking data from this month," S Krishnamurthy, director of publicity for the Indian Space Research Organisation, said from Bangalore.
The spacecraft structure has arrived at the ISRO Satellite Centre (ISAC) from Hindustan Aeronautics Limited and the integration work has begun, he said.
ISRO's deep space tracking network system is being established for the moon mission at Byalalu village, 40 km from Bangalore, and its first 18-metre antenna has been erected, he said.
A 32-metre antenna built by the Electronic Corporation of India and Bhabha Atomic Research Centre is currently being erected at the site.
Krishnamurthy said instruments from various collaborators, including the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA of the US, have also started coming in.
Though scientists first conceived India's moon mission in 1999, it was officially announced by former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee on August 15, 2003 and finally approved in November 2003.
The mission is scheduled for launch in March-April 2008.
With the geo-political importance of Chandrayaan, ISRO has pushed back other programmes that were conceived and scheduled much earlier, like the first science satellite Astrosat, which is now scheduled for 2009-10.
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