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TeamIndus (incorporated as Axiom Research LabsHow Axiom Research Labs has emerged as India's first private aerospace company
Kunal Talgeri, ''Economic Times''. 12 February 2017.
) is a private
for-profit Business is the practice of making one's living or making money by producing or buying and selling products (such as goods and services). It is also "any activity or enterprise entered into for profit." A business entity is not necessari ...
aerospace Aerospace is a term used to collectively refer to the atmosphere and outer space. Aerospace activity is very diverse, with a multitude of commercial, industrial, and military applications. Aerospace engineering consists of aeronautics and astron ...
company headquartered in
Bangalore Bengaluru, also known as Bangalore (List of renamed places in India#Karnataka, its official name until 1 November 2014), is the Capital city, capital and largest city of the southern States and union territories of India, Indian state of Kar ...
, India. It consists of a team of professionals from various backgrounds in science, technology, finance, and media, that came together in 2010 with the aim of winning the
Google Lunar X Prize The Google Lunar X Prize (GLXP) was a 2007–2018 inducement prize space competition organized by the X Prize Foundation, and sponsored by Google. The challenge called for privately funded teams to be the first to land a lunar rover on t ...
competition announced in 2007. Although the competition ended in 2018 without a winner, TeamIndus is still working towards developing and launching their lunar rover mission sometime in 2020 after partnering with OrbitBeyond. TeamIndus' lander was originally code-named HHK1, now called Z-01, and their rover is called ECA, an abbreviation for ''Ek Choti Si Asha'' (''A Small Hope'').Startup Street: Indian Startup Gets Another Chance To Land Rover On Moon
Mahima Kapoor and Azman Usmani, ''Bloomberg''. 8 April 2018.


Financing

Axiom Research Labs was established in 2010 with the aim to compete for the Google Lunar X Prize, and the following year it registered its team as TeamIndus. One of its co-founders was Rahul Narayan, who said in 2016 that the overall cost of the venture was expected to be US$75 million. In 2013, TeamIndus moved from
Delhi Delhi, officially the National Capital Territory (NCT) of Delhi, is a city and a union territory of India containing New Delhi, the capital of India. Straddling the Yamuna river, but spread chiefly to the west, or beyond its Bank (geography ...
to
Bangalore Bengaluru, also known as Bangalore (List of renamed places in India#Karnataka, its official name until 1 November 2014), is the Capital city, capital and largest city of the southern States and union territories of India, Indian state of Kar ...
due to the strategic location of the city. The
Indian Space Research Organisation The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO ) is India's national List of government space agencies, space agency, headquartered in Bengaluru, Karnataka. It serves as the principal research and development arm of the Department of Space (DoS), ...
(ISRO) is based in Bangalore which has also excellent aerospace companies that could help the team with building the lander and rover. L&T was helping by reviewing designs, and Rajiv Mody, founder CEO of the engineering firm Sasken Technologies gave space in its Bangalore facility for the team to operate out of and several former ISRO scientists were providing advice. The single largest investor at that time was
Nandan Nilekani Nandan Mohanrao Nilekani is an Indian entrepreneur. He co-founded Infosys and is the non-executive chairman of Infosys replacing R Seshasayee and Ravi Venkatesan, who were the co-chairs of the board, on 24 August 2017. After the exit of Vishal S ...
, who became involved in 2014 when TeamIndus launched its first round of funding, raising US$35 million. A second fundraising round in 2016 obtained investment from people such as R. K. Damani, Rakesh Jhunjhunwala, Ashish Kacholia, Rajiv Mody, Subrata Mitra, Shekhar Kirani, and Sharad Sharma. The organisation was awarded in January 2015 an interim US$1 million prize by Google Lunar X Prize for their successful demonstration on Earth of a proposed lunar landing system.


Mission

The Google Lunar X Prize competition ended in 2018 without a winner as no team met the 31 March 2018 launch deadline. Regardless, TeamIndus is still looking for funding in order to continue development and secure a launch vehicle for sometime in 2019.


Previous competition

In 2011, Axiom Research Labs registered a competing team at the
Google Lunar X Prize The Google Lunar X Prize (GLXP) was a 2007–2018 inducement prize space competition organized by the X Prize Foundation, and sponsored by Google. The challenge called for privately funded teams to be the first to land a lunar rover on t ...
under the name TeamIndus. The Google Lunar X Prize was a competition announced in 2007 that was open to privately funded ventures aimed at inspiring the development of low-cost robotic lunar exploration. The competing craft were required to travel more than on the lunar surface and transmit high-resolution video and images once there. TeamIndus registered for the competition in 2011.Aerospace startup Team Indus may crash land due to a paucity of funds
Hari Pulakkat, ''Economic Times''. 13 March 2018.
The launch deadline of the competition, which initially attracted entries from over 30 teams from 17 countries, was 31 March 2018. Google Lunar X Prize offered a main prize of US$20 million, a second prize of US$5 million and bonus prizes of US$5 million. Additional prizes totalling US$4.75 million were offered to those teams that met specific targets by 31 March 2018. The competition ended in 2018 without a winner as no team met the launch deadline. TeamIndus initially planned to attempt to win the endurance and distance bonus prizes by designing a
lunar lander A lunar lander or Moon lander is a Lander (spacecraft), spacecraft designed to Moon landing, land on the surface of the Moon. As of 2024, the Apollo Lunar Module is the only lunar lander to have ever been used in human spaceflight, completing s ...
and two rovers. They planned for the two rovers to be deployed together, which had a combined total mass of approximately . One rover was to compete for the main task, i.e. to travel more than 500 meters on the lunar surface and send feedback to Earth. The other rover would have competed for the US$5 million worth prize by completing additional tasks beyond baseline requirements to win the grand or the second place prize, such as endurance and range. In 2016, a contract with ISRO for a launch in 2017 was scheduled, using a
Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle The Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) is an expendable medium-lift launch vehicle designed and operated by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). It was developed to allow India to launch its Indian Remote Sensing (IRS) satellite ...
operated by
ISRO The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO ) is India's national space agency, headquartered in Bengaluru, Karnataka. It serves as the principal research and development arm of the Department of Space (DoS), overseen by the Prime Minister o ...
from the island of
Sriharikota Sriharikota () is a barrier island off the Bay of Bengal coast located in the Shar Project settlement of Tirupati district in Andhra Pradesh, India. It houses the Satish Dhawan Space Centre, one of the two satellite launch centres in India (the ...
. The launch contract was signed but not fully paid for. The rocket was to be shared with Hakuto, a fellow competitor from Japan. The planned mission duration was 30 Earth days. The TeamIndus' lunar lander platform was code-named HHK1. The team planned a further modification of the HHK1 for other terrestrial and inter-stellar application after the Google Lunar X Prize competition had completed. For the competition, the HHK1 was to deploy the rovers and then operate as the main communication and control unit consisting of payload, propulsion, structural and other sub-systems.Orbit Beyond, Inc.
Accessed: 29 October 2018.
The HHK-1 lander was designed to carry a payload of about 25 kg, including their two small rovers. Short in time and money, TeamIndus was unable to launch before the deadline, and the competition ended in 2018 without a winner.


Development

By April 2018, TeamIndus was working towards developing the hardware and launching the mission sometime in 2019,TeamIndus plans lunar probe launch in 2019, expanding India's private space ecosystem
Immanuel Jotham, ''International Business Times''. 8 April 2018.
possibly in partnership with Synergy Moon. By March 2018, the organisation had raised US$23 million, but were in need of additional US$35 million. The lander was initially code-named HHK1, and their single rover is called ECA, an abbreviation for ''Ek Choti Si Asha'' (''A Small Hope''). The spacecraft has a liquid rocket engine with a thrust capability of 440 N for deceleration, and sixteen small 22 N thrusters for finer orbital maneuvers and
attitude control Spacecraft attitude control is the process of controlling the orientation of a spacecraft (vehicle or satellite) with respect to an inertial frame of reference or another entity such as the celestial sphere, certain fields, and nearby objects, ...
(orientation). Then the lander would perform a soft landing at a location yet to be determined. The spacecraft would carry "a suite of commercial and experimental payloads." The HHK-1 lander may include a small ultraviolet telescope called Lunar Ultraviolet Cosmic Imager (LUCI) that was developed by the
Indian Institute of Astrophysics The Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA), with its headquarters in Bengaluru, is an autonomous research institute wholly funded by the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India. IIA conducts research primarily in the areas of ...
. In June 2016 a letter of intent was signed with the French space agency
CNES CNES () is the French national space agency. Headquartered in central Paris, the agency is overseen by the ministries of the Armed Forces, Economy and Finance and Higher Education, Research and Innovation. It operates from the Toulouse Spac ...
to carry the Color CMOS Camera for Space Exploration (''CASPEX'') micro-camera on board the team's rover, and the signed agreement was announced on 9 January 2017, specifying that the French agency would contribute two CASPEX cameras for the ECA rover. From 2016 to 2017, TeamIndus ran a competition called ''Lab2Moon'' which aimed to select scientific experiments that would be carried to the Moon. Space4Life, from Italy and Team ZΩI (team zoi) from
Kolkata Kolkata, also known as Calcutta ( its official name until 2001), is the capital and largest city of the Indian state of West Bengal. It lies on the eastern bank of the Hooghly River, west of the border with Bangladesh. It is the primary ...
, India were chosen as winners in 2017. Space4Life would test the potential to use
cyanobacteria Cyanobacteria ( ) are a group of autotrophic gram-negative bacteria that can obtain biological energy via oxygenic photosynthesis. The name "cyanobacteria" () refers to their bluish green (cyan) color, which forms the basis of cyanobacteri ...
as a shield against radiation, while Team ZΩI's experiment would conduct photosynthesis on the Moon.


Status

In late 2018, Team Indus (Axiom Research Labs) signed a working agreement with OrbitBeyondOrbitBeyond Teams with Team Indus, Honeybee Robotics for NASA Lunar Program
. Doug Messier, ''Parabolic Arc''. 29 November 2018.
that bid and won a NASA CLPS award to land several commercial payloads on the Moon. The lander was renamed '' Z-01'' and is planned to be launched on Q3 2020Z-01 Lander
Gunter Dirk Krebs, ''Gunter's Space Page''. Accessed on 17 June 2019.
and land at
Mare Imbrium Mare Imbrium (Latin ''imbrium'', the "Sea of Showers" or "Sea of Rains") is a vast lunar mare, lava plain within the Imbrium Basin on the Moon and is one of the larger craters in the Solar System. The Imbrium Basin formed from the collision ...
(29.52º N 25.68º W). On 29 July 2019, OrbitBeyond announced that it will retreat from the CPLS contract with NASA, meaning that the mission was canceled. The ECA rover is used as the basis for a Ceres Robotics rover called ''Minikhod''.TeamIndus' official website
{{Indian space programme Google Lunar X Prize Proposed space probes Private spaceflight companies Indian private spaceflight companies 2010 establishments in Karnataka Companies based in Bengaluru Indian companies established in 2010