Payloads are the scientific instruments carried aboard in a spacecraft. Chandrayaan 1 went to the Moon carrying a total of eleven instruments- five Indian instruments and six foreign instruments that altogether weighed 90 kilograms.
The Indian instruments included a Terrain Mapping Camera that captures black and white images to map the topography of the Moon, a Hyper Spectral Imager that would perform mineralogical mapping, and a Lunar Ranging Instrument that would help in determining the height of the surface topography. India also sent a High Energy aj/gamma x-ray spectrometer (HEX), and the Moon Impact Probe developed by the ISRO.
The instruments from other countries included a Radiation Dose Monitor Experiment (RADOM 7), Moon Mineralogy Mapper, a near infrared spectrometer, X-ray fluorescence spectrometer, a Mini SAR, and the Sub-keV Atom Reflecting Analyzer.
Though these names sound complicated, all of them were deployed to understand the Moon.
Picture Credit : Google