According to MoonDaily's AFP report India has announced that it will send a spacecraft to soft land on the Moon's surface by 2012.
India's Chandrayaan-1 mission currently orbiting the Moon is clearly providing them with some confidence that they can now proceed to the next level, a robotic lunar soft-landing. The proposed lander mission, Chandrayaan-2, would include a robotic probe able to "pick samples" for scientific study and transmit the science data back to Earth.
This announcement with a timeline compatible with the Google Lunar X PRIZE (GLXP) certainly lays down the gauntlet for the other major space agencies in the world that have not yet landed anything on the Moon but who claim to be preparing such missions, namely ESA, JAXA and CNSA. How will they respond?
