Lynred IR detector launched onboard India’s Chandrayaan-2 expedition to Moon’s South Pole

Lynred of Palaiseau (near Paris) and Veurey-Voroize (near Grenoble), France, which designs and manufactures infrared (IR) detectors for aerospace, defense and commercial applications, says that the payload on the Chandrayaan-2 orbiter - which launched by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) on 22 July from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in India - includes its Neptune infrared (IR) detector.

Chandrayaan-2 is viewed as ISRO’s most complex mission to date, as it will be the first to explore the Moon’s south polar region.

Lynred (a recent merger between Sofradir and ULIS) delivered the Neptune IR detector onboard the Chandrayaan-2 probe to ISRO in November 2017.

“This is the second time that ISRO has selected a Lynred IR detector for a space launch [after the hyperspectral imaging satellite HYSIS, last November], which further strengthens our more than ten-year partnership,” says Philippe Chorier, head of business development for space activity at Lynred. “We look forward to designing other IR products for future ISRO instruments.”

The Chandrayaan-2 weighs 3877kg. The payload includes 11 instruments, one of which is an imaging IR spectrometer (IIRS) designed with Lynred’s Neptune IR detector. It will conduct a more indepth onsite chemical analysis of the Moon and detection of minerals, water molecules and hydroxyl (containing oxygen and hydrogen atoms, i.e. hydroxyl radical OH). Since water is essential for life to function on Earth, the composition of the water-ice on the surface and subsurface and its origin are important objects of study for future space exploration and travel. The orbiter is expected to orbit the Moon for a year.

The presence of water on the Moon was confirmed during the previous Chandrayaan-1 mission, which did not include a Lynred IR detector. For Chandrayaan-2, the Lynred IR detector was chosen for its capacity to increase the upper spectral limit to 5.3µm (up from 3µm on Chandrayaan-1) in order to improve observation capabilities.

Lynred developed the IR detector for the IR imaging spectrometer, a 500 x 256 pixel SWIR-MWIR detector with a pitch of 30µm and a spectral range of 0.9µm to 5.3µm. It operates at 90K and is equipped with a special cold filter with four bands. Based on the space-proven Neptune/Saturn IR space detectors, the IR detector is designed for hyperspectral applications in which the image of the ground is distributed spectrally on the detector.

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