India’s Chandrayaan-1 lunar probe will fire a rocket Saturday, November 8, to insert itself into orbit. As I sat down to prepare a magazine news article about the mission earlier this week, I found myself lacking a decent piece of space art of the probe. A web search led me not to the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), which lofted the craft, but to a talented space enthusiast in England named Doug Ellison. He kindly provided the image of Chandrayaan-1 you will see in a future issue of Astronomy in the “Astro News” section.
Doug describes himself as a multimedia producer covering animation, filming, editing, media management, and DVD production for a medical e-learning company in the United Kingdom. He also claims to be “dictator for life” of the excellent web site unmannedspaceflight.com, a forum on the Internet for discussing — you guessed it — things that fly through space without people in them. Like Chandrayaan-1.
Through his interest in space science, Doug ended up producing a gorgeous computer animation of the Chandrayaan-1 flight to the Moon (warning: it took us a long time to load the movie, but it was well worth the wait) and its deployment of the C1XS X-ray spectrometer built by the UK’s Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL). He got to visit the RAL as part of the project and scrutinize the instrument in the facility’s high-tech clean room.
Cost to RAL and ISRO? Zero. He also provided a still shot of the animated sequence to us — again, no cost.
It seems he did it for the fun of it. This is just another of many examples we see every day of enthusiasts donating their time and many talents to promote amateur astronomy and space science. Remember, the French word amateur derives from the Latin amātor, or “lover,” from amāre, “to love.”