New Delhi - An experiment on board India's moon mission Chandrayaan-I has indicated there are abundant iron-bearing minerals on the lunar surface, news reports said Saturday.

Data beamed back to earth by the Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) instrument of the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) indicates abundance of iron-bearing minerals such as pyroxene, PTI news agency quoted a scientist involved with the experiment as saying.

The M3 is one of one of the 11 instruments on board the unmanned Chandrayaan, which was launched from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre near the southern city of Chennai on October 22.

Five instruments were indigenously built by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), while three were from the European Space Agency, two from NASA and one from Bulgaria.

The M3 had sent back images of the Orientale Basin on the western limb of the moon taken during the commissioning phase of Chandrayaan- I, Carle Pieters, a senior scientist from the US-based Brown University and principal investigator for the M3 experiment, was quoted as saying.

He said analysis of the data suggests there were large reserves of iron-bearing minerals on the lunar surface.

"The M3 provides us with compositional information across the moon that we have never had access to before," Pieters said, adding that the data provided a new level of detail to explore and understand the moon. (dpa)