New Delhi - A moon impact probe on board India's first lunar spacecraft Chandrayaan-1 was expected to hit the lunar surface Friday evening, an official of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) said.

The 35-kilogram probe, with the Indian flag painted on its sides, was expected to hit the moon's surface at a designated point at 8:30 pm (1500 GMT), ISRO director S Satish said from the southern city of Bangalore.

ISRO was monitoring the space mission from its telemetry and tracking centre located on the outskirts of the city.

The moon probe will take about 20 minutes to reach the lunar surface from the orbiting spacecraft. During the journey it is expected to take images of the moon and provide information on lunar surface properties.

If successful, India will be the fourth country - after the United States, Russia and Japan - to deploy a moon probe.

The probe will help garner information for future landings, ISRO chairman G Madhavan Nair was quoted as saying by IANS news agency.

Nair said ISRO planned to send a second spacecraft - Chandrayaan-II - to the moon in 2012 that will have a lander which will drop a small robot on the lunar surface to pick up soil samples and analyse data.

The ISRO is also working on a proposal to send a spacecraft to Mars, he said.

Chandrayaan-1, described as the cheapest moon mission ever, was launched from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre near the southern city of Chennai on October 22 and has successfully completed about 95 per cent of its mission over the past 24 days, according to ISRO officials.

The 1,380-kilogram spacecraft, built by the ISRO, was Friday orbiting the moon at a distance of 100 kilometres. In its present orbit the spacecraft takes about two hours to complete one circle of the moon, Satish said.

For the next two years, the spacecraft will carry out chemical, mineral and geological mapping of the moon with the 11 scientific payloads on board.

Five of these payloads have been designed by the Indian space agency; three devised and contributed by Germany, Britain and Sweden from the European Space Agency; two from the US space agency; and one from the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.

Two of the payloads - a terrain mapping camera and a radiation dose monitor - have been successfully switched on. The camera has taken pictures of the earth and moon and sent them back to the monitoring centre. (dpa)