The discovery of water on the moon may have been made public only now, but scientists at ISRO had got wind of it almost a year ago.
"ISRO followed a process of feeding continuous data to NASA by setting up a link from Bangalore to Maryland" said the source, a top ISRO scientist. "All credit to them for looking at the data."
All the raw material, about 1,000 gigabytes of information, was supplied by ISRO. "Our main aim was to supply information," he explained. "Everything came through us. We first brought the information down to earth and processed it."
The ISRO had also signed a data policy with NASA, which laid down that only principal scientists in the US would look at the information.
The scientist, gagged by an official order, opened up on condition of anonymity when MiD DAY requested information.
Bad days
Post August 29, 2009, when contact with the Chandrayaan was lost, scientists were feeling low. "But this news has brightened everything. Internally we had an inclination of what was happening but we waited patiently," he said.
ISRO scientists were elated. He was all praise for NASA and congratulated and complemented them on their work.
The scientist felt ISRO had already established itself, and "a mission of this size puts us in a fairly strong position."
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