Byalalu (Karnataka), Dec 16: India's first unmanned mission to the moon will be a remote sensing mission with an objective to do the chemical and mineral mapping.

"Chandrayaan-1 is basically a remote sensing mission doing a chemical and mineral mapping. Chandrayaan-2 will be a lander and rover mission, " said M Annadurai, Chandrayaan Project Director.

"Under Chandrayaan-1 going on orbiting mission and possibly we will be demonstrating technologies required for landing is concerned, which is more impact prone, " he added.

The scientists at the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) are also working on subsequent Chandrayan-2 mission basically meant for the robotic mission.

"We will be having a lander and rover there that will be doing instant chemical analysis, " Annadurai said.

The ISRO launched four satellites on a single rocket for the first time in January, including one that was brought back to earth to set the stage for the country to send an astronaut into space by 2014 and a manned mission to the moon by 2020.

Sixteen Indian satellites currently orbit the earth, supporting telecommunications, TV broadcasting, earth observation, weather forecasting, remote education and healthcare.

Head of ISRO's telemetry division said the country's indigenously built 32-metre dish antenna, deep space network (DSN), was ready for performance test.

"For any space mission the ground system has to be complemented. The major component in the ground system is deep space network, " Director of the telemetry, tracking and command network, Shiv Kumar said, adding, "We can receive the telemetry signals from the satellite which will tell us about satellite health and subsequent performance and manoeuvring capabilities etc which is built into the satellite and we can also send commercial satellite from the same ground station. "

The DSN, built at a cost of nearly 2.5 million dollars, is capable of performing telemetry, tracking, and command operations in S-band and science data reception in X-band.

India's constellation of seven earth-observation satellites is the largest of its kind in the world. (ANI)