Chandrayaan - indian mission to moon

Do you know what is the most less talked about features of the chandrayaan mission?

We all talk about India’s giant leap that it will take after the launch of chandrayaan mission. Its will not only put Indian space program to limelight but also enhance the space prowness of Indian space program. But what is the less talked about feature of this whole chandrayaan mission.

It’s the 64-pound impactor that will be dropped from the orbiting chandrayaan spacecraft for a suicidal nosedive into the moon. The impactor as it falls towards the moon’s soil will relay video imagery, altitude information and spectral data back to Earth through the Chandrayaan mothership, which will be in a lunar orbit 100 kilometers away.

To my knowledge this will be the first Indian thing that will touch the moon’s soil!

In what way will this Moon Impact Probe be useful for future missions?
G. Madhavan Nair, Chairman, ISRO, answered this

The impactor is essentially to evaluate the lunar trajectories. When we send the spacecraft to the moon, the gravitational field will have a strong influence on its [the spacecraft's] orbit. We have some inputs available on this based on past missions. But when the spacecraft orbits the moon we will get some data on this. Using these, we will try to define a trajectory for the impactor. That will be one of our major experiments. As the impactor descends, it will take closer pictures of the lunar surface and when it impacts, it will kick up some dust. Using the mass spectrometer, we will be able to get the signature related to the composition of the material that covers the lunar surface. This is the first step towards later missions, which that will require a soft landing and a robot, experimental set-up to analyse and return the data.