In the past few days, India’s lunar mission has accomplished many historic milestones. Like placing Indian tri color on the lunar surface by MIP (Moon Impactor Probe) on 14th November,it has also started sending pictures,its various scientific instruments are being sucessfully turned on, one after other.

It now has a operational TMC (Terrain Mapping Camera) and LLRI (Lunar LASER Ranging Instrument).

Here are the pics which Chandrayaan-I took recently: (more…)

Chandryaan-I, India’s first unmanned moon probe has successfully entered moon’s orbit today. Chandrayaan-I, which was launched on 22 November 2008 has completed one of the most difficult steps called “Lunar Orbit Insertion” or LOI to enter the moon’s gravitational field. LOI started at around 1700 HRS (IST). Earlier, the spacecraft completed five orbit raising manouevres to raise the apogee (farthest point of the orbit) to about 3,80,000 kms.

“The liquid apogee motor on board the spacecraft was fired for about 805 seconds to put Chandrayaan-1 into an elliptical orbit with 7,500 km aposelene (farthest from moon) and 500 km pericelene (nearest to moon),” ISRO director S. Satish told IANS.

This step is very critical in any mission. Nearly 30% of US and USSR’s mission have failed at this very step i.e. LOI, and ISRO has achieved this without any glitch. With that India’s first lunar mission has also been declared successful.

The probe which is travelling around moon at an height of 500 kms will have its orbit gradually lowered to 100 kms in the coming 2-4 days and then ISRO will attempt to send the “impactor probe” to the moon to place Indian flag on its surface.

[click pictures to enlarge]

India’s 1st lunar probe,Chandrayaan-I is well on its journey to moon. It has started sending pictures from space. ISRO recently recieved pictures taken by Chandrayaan-I on 29 October, a week after Chandrayaan-I took off from Srikarikota.The pictures were taken from the on board Terrain Mapping Camera or TMC. The first picture(image 1) taken from an altitude of 9,000 km shows the Northern coast of Australia while the other (image 2) taken from a height of 70,000 km shows Australia’s Southern Coast. As you can see the resolutions of the images is good,even from an altitude of 9,000 km or 70,000 kms. I cant wait to see the images it clicks of the moon from the height of 100km. Surely they will provide very detailed view of moon’s surface. There are talks that the high resolution 3D pics taken by Chandrayaan-I will put to rest to the conspiracies and theories about whether or not US made or faked the landing on the moon.