Categories: MissionsMoon

Chandrayaan-1 Closer to the Moon; Snaps First Lunar Shot

[/caption]
Following the fifth and final orbit raising maneuver which put Chandrayaan-1 closer to the moon, the spacecraft snapped the first picture of its final destination. This clear, crisp image of the moon While the images are still being processed and are not available yet, mission managers says the images bode well for spacecraft’s mission to map the entire moon’s surface with its Terrain Mapping Camera. And all systems are go for the final maneuver on November 8, which will put Chandrayaan-1 in lunar orbit.

After launch on October 22, the spacecraft was first injected into an elliptical 7-hr orbit around Earth, at 255 km from Earth at perigee (its closest point) and 22,860 km away at apogee, its farthest point. After five engine firings, Chandrayaan-1 has spiraled outwards in increasingly elongated ellipses around Earth, until it reached its lunar transfer orbit on November 4.

Chandrayaan-1 in its lunar transfer orbit. Credit: ISRO

In the final maneuver, engineers fired the spacecraft’s 440 Newton liquid-fuel propelled engine for about two and a half minutes. The lunar transfer orbit’s farthest point from Earth is about 380,000 km.

On November 8, as it nears the moon, the spacecraft’s engine will be fired again to slow the spacecraft, allowing the moon’s gravity to capture it, and then it will go into an initial elliptical orbit around the moon. A group of engineers from JPL are assisting the engineers from India, acting as experienced back-up for the “first-time-flyers” from India. And everything has gone smoothly thus far.

The spacecraft will make observations from the initial orbit, and then the orbit will be lowered a 100 km circular polar orbit. Following this, the Moon Impact Probe (MIP) will be ejected, impacting the lunar surface. Then the main mission will begin with Chandrayaan-1 exploring the moon from orbit with its array of instruments for two years.

Source: Bharat Chronicle

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy has been with Universe Today since 2004, and has published over 6,000 articles on space exploration, astronomy, science and technology. She is the author of two books: "Eight Years to the Moon: the History of the Apollo Missions," (2019) which shares the stories of 60 engineers and scientists who worked behind the scenes to make landing on the Moon possible; and "Incredible Stories from Space: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos" (2016) tells the stories of those who work on NASA's robotic missions to explore the Solar System and beyond. Follow Nancy on Twitter at https://twitter.com/Nancy_A and and Instagram at and https://www.instagram.com/nancyatkinson_ut/

Recent Posts

We Understand Rotating Black Holes Even Less Than We Thought

The theory of black holes has several mathematical oddities. Recent research shows our understanding of…

4 hours ago

Habitable Worlds are Found in Safe Places

When we think of exoplanets that may be able to support life, we hone in…

4 hours ago

New Glenn Booster Moves to Launch Complex 36

Nine years ago, Blue Origin revealed the plans for their New Glenn rocket, a heavy-lift…

5 hours ago

How Many Additional Exoplanets are in Known Systems?

NASA's TESS mission has turned up thousands of exoplanet candidates in almost as many different…

9 hours ago

Hubble and Webb are the Dream Team. Don't Break Them Up

Many people think of the James Webb Space Telescope as a sort of Hubble 2.…

16 hours ago

Scientists Have Figured out why Martian Soil is so Crusty

On November 26th, 2018, NASA's Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy, and Heat Transport (InSight)…

24 hours ago