Bengaluru: India will soon experience the moon minute, thanks to a company by name “Team Indus”. Back in 2010, Rahul, the co – founder of the Team Indus, had never thought his ideas would land on moon.
Team Indus at ISRO launch contract press briefing
During the start-up stage, the company was involved in developing products for the e-commerce sectors.
Team Indus is now among the top 3 teams at Google Lunar X-Prize, a privately funded effort to build and land a spacecraft on the moon by Dec 2017.
In the year 2007, Google announced the Google Lunar X-Prize competition to build a rover that can move 500 meters on lunar surface and can also send the high resolution images and videos of earth surface.
Rahul and his team genuinely started creating a rover that can move on the lunar surface, making him the prime candidate for winning the prize and the team is now set to land its rover on moon next year.
Narayan’s “Team Indus” is the only private company to represent India in the Google Lunar X-Prize competition along with 16 teams vying for a chance to land their rover on the moon and win the $30 million prize.
Rahul says, “Team Indus was set up to accomplish a complex engineering task in the process forever redefining what is thought possible out of India. Team Indus has reached this far preliminarily on account of the energy, experience and enthusiasm demonstrated by the team in the face of challenges known-unknown, resource and time constraints”.
When asked about the feeling of being successful he says, “Fuelling our journey has been the support we have received from partners, investors and supporters’’
According to the Google Lunar X-Prize rule, the team has to secure 90 percent of the funds privately and the launch contract needs to be secured from the space agency before 2016.
The team has been collaboratively working with the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) since 2014. With the success of Indus Team, ISRO has agreed to set the rover off in a PSLV rocket on December 28, 2017, that will land on the lunar surface on January 28, 2018. Seeking the favour of the ISRO Company the team is ready to make the dream come true.
India will be the fourth country to achieve the mission of moon minute, right after the countries like USA, Russia and China.
Team Indus has designed the mission on the concept of “Made in India” in order to cut the cost. Nearly 100 people have worked on the project including 20 retired ISRO scientists to make the mission happen.
