Images of the moon are printed on the inflatable balloon.
Guwahati:
A beautiful replica of the moon is proving to be a crowd puller at the ongoing India International Science Festival at IIT, Guwahati.
The installation, with a diameter of seven meters, was conceived by British artist Luke Jerram and was created using images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) flown to the moon by NASA.
The images of the moon are printed on the inflatable balloon and each centimeter represents approximately five kilometers of the moon's surface. The rendition, titled “The Museum Of Moon”, is so good that the mountains and craters of the moon seem to have come alive on the IIT campus.
The Shiv Shakti point, where India's Vikram Lander landed earlier this year as part of the Chandrayaan 3 mission, is not marked on the installation. However, on the installation you can visualize how India made history by becoming the first country to land near the undiscovered south pole of the moon.
Incidentally, global experts are recognizing and using the images of the Moon taken by the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter, which provided never-before-seen high-resolution images of the lunar surface. India is planning the follow-up mission Chandrayaan 4, which will attempt to retrieve samples from the moon near the Shiv Shakti point.
The India International Science Festival is supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology and is supported by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research in association with VIBHA of Vigyan Bharati. About 8,000 delegates are expected to participate in the annual science festival.