MUMBAI: If things go as planned, the Indian tricolour will mark its presence on the moon tonight (around 8.30pm IST) after having flown 3,86,000km from the earth. The timing of this proud moment has been specially designed to coincide with Children's Day. (
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The United States, the former Soviet Union and the European Space Agency comprising 17 countries already have their flags on the moon.
The Indian tricolour is painted on all sides of the 29-kg Moon Impact Probe which is attached to the main orbiting spacecraft, Chandrayaan-1, which was launched on October 22.
The inclusion of the MIP as part of the Chandrayaan mission came at the suggestion of former President A P J Abdul Kalam, a former rocket scientist, during the International Lunar Exploration Working Group conference held at Udaipur in November 2004.
The Indian tricolour has been hoisted on Mount Everest and Antarctica. And now it will be on the moon though it will not be hoisted.
The flight of the MIP on Friday is expected to be a forerunner to the second Indian moon mission, Chandrayaan-2, which will carry a Russian rover and alander slated for lift-off between 2010 and 2012. The crash landing of MIP will help in assessing future soft-landing technologies.
Chandrayaan project director Mylaswamy Annadurai explained to TOI on Friday that at about 8 pm on Friday, a command will be flashed to the MIP from Isro's telemetry, tracking and command network (Istrac) at Bangalore for it to detach from the orbiter. "The MIP will separate and with its three instruments, zoom towards the lunar south pole at a velocity of 1.5km per second," he said.
"At Istrac's mission control room, we will immediately come to know that the MIP has separated from the orbiter. The MIP's flight path will first take it over the Malapert crater for about nine seconds and then crashland near the Shackleton Crater about 25 minutes after its detachment from the orbiter. Malapert Crater is not far from the Shackleton crater," he added.
Annadurai said that after this, the orbiter will fly in the opposite side and thus data will not be immediately available. "The downloading of data from the MIP to the orbiting Chandrayaan and then to the ground station will start once the spacecraft comes over the north pole of the moon. It will take a couple of hours for the data from the MIP to be downloaded and processed," Annadurai said.
He said that once the MIP crashlands on the moon, its own survivability and that of the three instruments will be in question. The probe uses solid propellants. "India's physical presence on the moon with the tricolour will be assured," he said.
At 8:34 pm Indian time Friday night (1504 UTC), India became the fourth country to land its flag on the Moon.
The unmanned lunar orbiter Chandrayaan-1 ejected its Moon Impact Probe (MIP), which hurtled across the surface of the Moon at 1.5 kilometres per second (3000 miles per hour), and successfully crash landed near the Moon's south pole.
Besides carrying three important scientific instruments, the lunar probe also carried the image of the Indian national flag, painted on all sides.
India's tricolour is marked on all sides of the Moon Impact Probe
Chandrayaan-1 (meaning 'Moon craft' in Sanskrit) reached its target lunar orbit on Wednesday.  The orbiter will remain in a circular orbit 102 kilometres above the Moon's surface for two years.  Its instruments will be gradually commissioned over the next few days.

With this landing, India became both the fourth country to place a flag on the Moon and the fifth group to send a spacecraft to the Moon. The other countries which have sent spacecraft to the Moon are the United States, the former Soviet Union, Japan, and China, along with the European Space Agency (ESA), a consortium of 17 countries.  
Japan and China currently each have scientific satellites orbiting the Moon, though China has not yet put a spacecraft on the moon's surface.

The MIP has a mass of 29 kg, is about the size of a microwave oven, and was designed and assembled in India.
After the orbiter ejected it, the probe took about 25 minutes to reach the Moon's surface. 
On-board digital cameras made a high resolution movie of the surface during descent, and scientists also conducted measurements with the probe's mass spectrometer and radar altimeter.
Data was beamed back to India via the orbiter, and it is currently being processed and analysed.
The Moon's south pole 
Data from the altimeter experiments will be used to refine the instrument in order to control the soft landing of a future probe.  
Plans are already being prepared for the Chandrayaan-2 to be launched by 2012.

India's first lunar mission was launched from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre on the Andhra Pradesh coast on October 22.
The launch vehicle was an Indian designed and built rocket that had been previously proven by carrying scientific and commercial payloads to earth orbit, including weather and communications satellites.
The cost of this mission is estimated at 340 crore (3.4 billion) rupees (US$78 million). 
The mission carries five scientific instruments built by India's technology sector, and six developed cooperatively with foreign nations.

Goals for the orbiter include making a detailed map of the Moon's chemical make-up and mineral resources, as well as a three-dimensional digital map of the entire surface. 
The mission will examine the surface for sources of water, and take comparison photos of the light side and dark sides of the surface.