AS India advances in the field of science, The Hindu highlights the country's interest in reaching the moon in an editorial published Monday. Excerpts: Humankind has long been fascinated by the moon. With the dawn of the space age, scientists had conjectured that the moon might hold water. But the lunar samples, when analyzed on earth, suggested otherwise. However, two US spacecraft that traveled to the moon in the 1990s found indications that water in the form of ice lay trapped in the icy cold depths of permanently shadowed lunar craters. These findings were contested and it was India's Chandrayaan-1, the country's first space probe launched two years ago, that finally provided a persuasive case for water on the moon. The matter has now been decisively settled by the US Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite. The last humans who walked on the moon returned home almost 40 years ago and many more years could pass before humans go back again. The current US Administration has cancelled much of the Constellation program, which aimed to send humans again by 2020. China, on the other hand, is embarking on an ambitious program of lunar exploration. Its second lunar probe, the Chang'e-2, has begun orbiting the moon. This spacecraft will set the stage for a mission to land a robotic rover in 2013. The country also plans to send an automated sample-return mission four years later. China, which has successfully sent six astronauts into space, could attempt a manned moon landing in 2025, according to one of its senior space scientists. India, for its part, intends to launch the Chandrayaan-2 mission in 2013; it will have an orbiter studying the moon from space while a Russian-built lander puts a rover on the ground below. Thus humanity's quest to understand the moon goes on. __
