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/
Chandrayaan-1's first picture of the Moon. Credit: ISRO
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UPDATE: The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) announced on 11/12 that the 100 km science orbit has been successfully achieved. Congrats to the Chandrayaan-1 team!
India’s space agency released the first picture of the Moon taken by the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft. While it’s not a superlative image, as Emily Lakdawalla from the Planetary Society blog says, it is a milestone. Emily also explained that this photo has a resolution more than 3,000 times poorer than the eventual science images will have because the camera on Chandrayaan-1 was designed to take images from an a 100-kilometer science orbit (this image was taken on Nov. 4 at 311,200 kilometers away from the Moon). And today, the spacecraft got closer to that final science orbit by firing its engines for 31 seconds, reducing its perigee (nearest distance to the moon) from 187 km to 101 km.
Chandrayaan-1’s orbit is still elliptical, and its apogee (farthest distance from the moon) is now 255 km. In this orbit, Chandrayaan-1, takes two hours and nine minutes to go around the Moon. On Wednesday evening, the Spacecraft Control Centre at Bangalore will issue commands for the spacecraft to fire its engines again to reduce the apogee to 100 km, putting the spacecraft into its final science orbit.
Then, on either Nov. 14 or 15, the Moon Impact Probe will be released. It weighs 35 kg, and once released will take about 25 minutes to impact. It will hit a pre-selected location (Chandrayaan-1 Twitter says to keep an eye on Shackleton Crater), and the primary objective is to demonstrate the technologies required for landing the probe at a desired location on the Moon and to qualify some of the technologies related to future soft landing missions.
Saturn's moon Prometheus collides with the F Ring. Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
This is absolutely astounding! The Cassini spacecraft captured a collision between Saturn’s moon Prometheus and the F ring, which creates a “streamer;” material being pulled from the ring by the moon’s gravity, leaving behind a dark channel. There’s even a movie of the event! The creation of these streamers and channels occurs in a cycle that repeats during each of Prometheus’ orbits. During its 14.7 hour orbit of Saturn, when Prometheus reaches apoapse, or where it is farthest away from Saturn and closest to the F ring, the oblong moon draws a streamer of material from the ring. But since Prometheus orbits faster than the material in the ring, this new streamer is pulled from a different location in the ring about 3.2 degrees (in longitude) ahead of the previous one. In this way, a whole series of streamer-channels is created along the F ring, and Cassini has captured more images showing what are called streamer-channels.
New images, as the one below, again look at the streamer-channels. This image looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 36 degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on September 30, 2008. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 970,000 kilometers (602,000 miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-ring-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 45 degrees. Image scale is 5 kilometers (3 miles) per pixel.
In some observations, 10 to 15 streamer-channels can easily be seen in the F ring at one time (at left). Eventually, a streamer-channel disappears as shearing forces (i.e., Keplerian shear) act to disperse the constituent dust particles.
The movie shows just under half of a complete streamer-channel cycle. The dark frames in the movie represent the period during which Prometheus and the F ring pass through Saturn’s shadow. The images in the movie were acquired by the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on November 23 and 24, 2006. The movie sequence consists of 72 clear spectral filter images taken every 10.5 minutes over a period of about 12.5 hours.
Crystals (insets) found in planetary disks. Credit: Caltech
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The Spitzer Space Telescope has, for the first time, detected tiny quartz-like crystals sprinkled in young planetary systems. This surprises astronomers, because these crystals, which are types of silica minerals called cristobalite and tridymite, require flash heating events, such as shock waves, to order to form. So what is going on in these planetary disks to create this type of materials? The findings suggest that shock waves from swirling gas and dust are responsible for creating the stuff of planets throughout the universe. “Spitzer has given us a better idea of how the raw materials of planets are produced very early on,” said William Forrest of the University of Rochester, N.Y “By studying these other star systems, we can learn about the very beginnings of our own planets 4.6 billion years ago.” The big question is, though, with these crystals, can astronomers foretell the future? (Just kidding)
Planets are born out of swirling pancake-like disks of dust and gas that surround young stars. They start out as mere grains of dust swimming around in a disk of gas and dust, before lumping together to form full-fledged planets. During the early stages of planet development, the dust grains crystallize and adhere together, while the disk itself starts to settle and flatten. This occurs in the first millions of years of a star’s life.
When Forrest and his colleagues used Spitzer to examine five young planet-forming disks about 400 light-years away, they detected the signature of silica crystals. Silica is made of only silicon and oxygen and is the main ingredient in glass. When melted and crystallized, it can make the large hexagonal quartz crystals often sold as mystical tokens. When heated to even higher temperatures, it can also form small crystals like those commonly found around volcanoes.
It is this high-temperature form of silica crystals, specifically cristobalite and tridymite, that Forrest’s team found in planet-forming disks around other stars for the first time. “Cristobalite and tridymite are essentially high-temperature forms of quartz,” said Sargent. “If you heat quartz crystals, you’ll get these compounds.”
In fact, the crystals require temperatures as high as 1,220 Kelvin (about 1,740 degrees Fahrenheit) to form. But young planet-forming disks are only about 100 to 1,000 Kelvin (about minus 280 degrees Fahrenheit to 1,340 Fahrenheit) — too cold to make the crystals. Because the crystals require heating followed by rapid cooling to form, astronomers theorized that shock waves could be the cause.
Shock waves, or supersonic waves of pressure, are thought to be created in planet-forming disks when clouds of gas swirling around at high speeds collide. Some theorists think that shock waves might also accompany the formation of giant planets.
So maybe astronomers will be able to predict the type of planets in this newly forming solar system!
The findings are in agreement with local evidence from our own solar system. Spherical pebbles, called chondrules, found in ancient meteorites that fell to Earth are also thought to have been crystallized by shock waves in our solar system’s young planet-forming disk. In addition, NASA’s Stardust mission found tridymite minerals in comet Wild 2.
Forrest and University of Rochester graduate student Ben Sargent led the research, which will be published in the Astrophysical Journal.
Submillimeter astronomy used to be known as the last unexplored wavelength frontier. But this new image from the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) telescope reveals the awesome power of submillimetre-wavelength astronomy, and shows another new frontier: a birthplace of new stars. An expanding bubble of ionized gas about ten light-years across is causing the surrounding material to collapse into dense clumps, creating new stars. Submillimetre light is the key to revealing some of the coldest material in the Universe, such as these cold, dense clouds.
The region, called RCW120, is about 4,200 light years from Earth, towards the constellation of Scorpius. A hot, massive star in its centre is emitting huge amounts of ultraviolet radiation, which ionizes the surrounding gas, stripping the electrons from hydrogen atoms and producing the characteristic red glow of so-called H-alpha emission.
As this ionized region expands into space, the associated shock wave sweeps up a layer of the surrounding cold interstellar gas and cosmic dust. This layer becomes unstable and collapses under its own gravity into dense clumps, forming cold, dense clouds of hydrogen where new stars are born. However, as the clouds are still very cold, with temperatures of around -250? Celsius, their faint heat glow can only be seen at submillimetre wavelengths. Submillimetre light is therefore vital in studying the earliest stages of the birth and life of stars.
The submillimeter waveband between the far-infrared and microwave wavebands.
The submillimetre-wavelength data were taken with the LABOCA camera on the 12-m Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) telescope, located on the 5000 m high plateau of Chajnantor in the Chilean Atacama desert. With LABOCA’s high sensitivity, astronomers were able to detect clumps of cold gas four times fainter than previously possible. Since the brightness of the clumps is a measure of their mass, this also means that astronomers can now study the formation of less massive stars than they could before.
The next generation of submillimeter telescopes is also being built on the plateau of Chajnantor. ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array will use over sixty 12-m antennas, linked together over distances of more than 16 km, to form a single, giant telescope. It is slated to be completed in 2012.
The deck of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit is so dusty that the rover almost blends into the dusty background. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell
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Martian dust storms are wreaking havoc with human spacecraft. Not only did a dust storm cut short the Phoenix lander’s extended mission, but now, another dust storm around Gusev Crater has cut into the amount of sunlight reaching the solar array on Spirit, one of the Mars Exploration Rovers, leaving the rover in serious trouble from diminished power. From the image above, it’s obvious Spirit’s solar panels are thickly coated with dust. Although this image was taken over a year ago, it’s likely the solar panels have only gotten worse.
Spirit’s solar array produced only 89 watt hours of energy during the rover’s 1,725th Martian day, which ended on Nov. 9. This is the lowest output by either Spirit or its twin, Opportunity, in their nearly five years on Mars, and much less energy than Spirit needs each day. The charge level of Spirit’s batteries is dropping so low, it risks triggering an automated response of the rover trying to protect itself.
“The best chance for survival for Spirit is for us to maintain sequence control of the rover, as opposed to it going into automated fault protection,” said John Callas of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., project manager for Spirit and Opportunity.
Mission controllers are commanding Spirit to turn off some heaters, including one that protects a science instrument, the miniature thermal emission spectrometer, and take other measures to reduce energy consumption. The commands will tell Spirit not to try communicating again until Thursday. While pursuing that strategy the team also plans to listen to Spirit frequently during the next few days to detect signals the rover might send if it does go into a low-energy fault protection mode.
Mars weather forecasts suggest the dust storm may be clearing now or in the next few days. However, the dust falling from the sky onto Spirit’s solar array panels also could leave a lingering reduction in the amount of electricity the rover can produce.
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Astronauts on the crew of STS-126, scheduled to launch on space shuttle Endeavour on Friday, Nov. 14 will be doing some big home improvement projects on their visit to the International Space Station. This mission will allow the ISS to double its crew size, as well as making sure there will be enough power for everyone living on board the orbital outpost. “It’s the most jam-packed logistics module we have ever carried up there,” STS-126 Commander Chris Ferguson said. “We’re taking a three-bedroom, one-bathroom house and turning it into a five-bedroom, two-bathroom house with a gym.”
The major additions are extra sleeping compartments, another bathroom, specialized workout equipment, a state-of-the-art water recycling system, and a refrigerator. But spacewalking astronauts will also attempt to clean up a malfunctioning SARJ – the Solar Alpha Rotary Joint that allows the station’s solar arrays to constantly track the sun. The huge mechanism hasn’t worked right for more than a year, and astronauts will clean up metal shavings from grinding parts, replace the trundle bearing assemblies and add special lubrication. It’s a big job, and will take four spacewalks to complete, including adding lubrication the port side SARJ, which has been working fine. But NASA doesn’t want to take any chances.
So astronauts will be busy both outside and in at the station during the mission, which will bring 14,500 lbs of supplies and equipment to the ISS.
“We’re going to use up a lot of the new space that we’ve brought up on the past few missions, with Node 2 and Columbus and the Kibo module,” lead shuttle flight director Mike Sarafin said. “The six-person crew is an important step toward utilizing the space station to its full capability.” STS-126 crew. Credit: NASA The crew includes: Christopher Ferguson, commander, Eric Boe, pilot, Sandra Magnus, Stephen Bowen, Donald Pettit, Robert (Shane) Kimbrough and Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper.
But in addition to fully utilizing the space station, the equipment brought up will allow the space station to start depending less on the space shuttle. A new regenerative environmental control and life support system will give the station the ability to recycle urine and the condensation that the crew breathes into the air into pure water that can be used for drinking or to cool the station’s systems.
Endeavour’s commander, Christopher Ferguson, considers the water system the single most important piece of equipment that he’s delivering. It’s important for when the shuttle fleet is retired in 2010, and its water deliveries dry up. But Ferguson said the benefits go beyond the space station.
“This is really it, and it has no parallel. I would challenge you to find any other system on the Earth that recycles urine into drinkable water. It’s such a repulsive concept that nobody would even broach it. But that day will come on this planet, too, where we’re going to need to have these technologies in place, and this is just a great way to get started.”
“Up until this point, the majority of the station’s drinking water was coming up from the shuttle or the Russian’s Progress vehicle,” Sarafin said. “This sets us up for long-term sustainability of the station without the shuttle.”
Nobody will be drinking the water generated by the system just yet – an onboard purity monitor needs to be checked out and multiple water samples must be analyzed by scientists on the ground first. To get that water sample home as quickly as possible, Endeavour’s crew will take a shot at getting the system hooked up before they leave.
The new additions to the space station will be a good way to mark the 10th birthday of the International Space Station on Nov. 20 – 10 years after the first station module was launched into space and construction began.
“We’ll be transitioning to true utilization and setting up for six-person crew at that 10-year bench mark,” Sarafin said. “It’s been a tremendous international effort to get to this point, and I can’t think of a better way to celebrate it.”
Ever since our recent encounter with asteroid 2008 TC3 — the first asteroid that was correctly predicted to hit our planet — I’ve had impact craters on the brain. Earth has about 175 known impact craters, but surely our planet has endured more bashing than that in its history. All the other terrestrial planets and moons in our solar system are covered by impact craters. Just look at our Moon through a telescope or binoculars, or check out the recent images of Mercury sent back by the MESSENGER spacecraft, or pictures of Mars from the armada of spacecraft orbiting the Red Planet, and you’ll see that impact craters are the most common landforms in our solar system.
But since two-thirds of Earth is covered by water, any asteroid impacts occurring in the oceans are difficult to find. And even though Earth’s atmosphere protects us from smaller asteroids, just like in the case of 2008 TC3, which broke up high in the atmosphere, weathering, erosion and the tectonic cycling of Earth’s crust have erased much of the evidence of Earth’s early bombardment by asteroids and comets. Most of Earth’s impact craters have been discovered since the dawn of the space age, from satellite imaging. In fact, a geologist recently discovered an impact crater using Google Earth!
Here’s my list of Earth’s Ten Most Impressive Impact Craters, starting with #1. the largest and oldest known impact crater, Vredefort Crater, shown above, located in South Africa. It is approximately 250 kilometers in diameter and is thought to to be about two billion years old. The Vredefort Dome can be seen in this satellite image as a roughly circular pattern. What an impact that must have been!
Manicouagan Reservoir. Credit: NASA 2. Manicouagan Crater: fifth largest known impact crater. This crater is located in Quebec, Canada. It was created about 212 million years ago. Now, it is an ice-covered lake about 70 km across. This image, taken by space shuttle astronauts, shows an outer ring of rock. Close up, the rock reveals clear signs of having been melted and altered by a violent collision. The original rim of the crater, though now eroded away, is thought to have had a diameter of about 100 km.
Chicxulub Crater. 3. Chicxulub Crater, third largest and possible dinosaur killer. The third largest impact crater lies mostly underwater and buried underneath the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. At 170km (105 miles) in diameter, the impact is believed to have occurred roughly 65 million years ago when a comet or asteroid the size of a small city crashed, unleashing the equivalent to 100 teratons of TNT. Likely, it caused destructive tsunamis, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions around the world, and is widely believed to have led to the extinction of dinosaurs, because the impact probably created a global firestorm and/or a widespread greenhouse effect that caused long-term environmental changes.
Aorounga Crater. Credit: NASA 4. Aorounga Crater: possible triple crater. The main Aorounga Crater in Chad, Africa, visible in this radar image from space, shows a concentric ring structure that is about 17 kilometers wide. But, this crater might have been formed as the result of a multiple impact event. A second crater, similar in size to the main crater, appears as a circular trough in the center of the image. And a third structure, also about the same size, is seen as a dark, partial circular trough on the right side of the image. The proposed crater “chain” could have formed when a 1 km to 2 km (0.5 mile to 1 mile) diameter object broke apart before impact. Ouch! Clearwater craters. Credit: NASA 5. Clearwater Craters: two for the price of one. Twin, lake-filled impact craters in Quebec, Canada were probably formed simultaneously, about 290 million years ago, by two separate but probably related meteorite impacts. The larger crater, Clearwater Lake West has a diameter of 32 km, and Clearwater Lake East is 22 km wide.
Barringer Crater. 6. Barringer Crater: well preserved. While this crater isn’t all that big, what’s most impressive about Barringer Crater in Arizona (USA) is how well preserved it is. Measuring 1.2 km across and 175 m deep, Barringer Crater was formed about 50,000 years ago by the impact of an iron meteorite, probably about 50 m across and weighing several hundred thousand tons. Most of the meteorite was vaporized or melted, leaving only numerous, mostly small fragments with in the crater and scattered up to 7 km from the impact site. Only about 30 tons, including a 693-kg sample, are known to have been recovered. Wolfe Creek Crater 7. Wolfe Creek Crater, well preserved, too. Another relatively well-preserved meteorite crater is found in the desert plains of north-central Australia. Wolfe Creek crater is thought to be about 300,000 years old and is 880 meters across and and about 60 meters deep. It’s partially buried under the wind-blown sand of the region, and although the unusual landform was well-known to the locals, scientists didn’t find the crater until 1947. Deep Bay Crater. Credit: NASA 8. Deep Bay Crater: deep and cold. Deep Bay crater is located in Saskatchewan, Canada. The bay is a strikingly circular 13 km wide impact crater and is also very deep (220 m). It is part of an otherwise irregular and shallow lake. The age of the crater is estimated to be 99 million years old.
Kara-Kul Crater. Credit: NASA 9. Kara-Kul Crater: high altitude crater. This crater was formed about 10 million years ago, and is located in Tajikistan, near the Afghan border. In total, the crater is about 45 km in diameter and is partially filled with a 25 km-wide lake. This might be the “highest” impact crater, almost 6,000 m above sea-level in the Pamir Mountain Range. It was found only recently from satellite images.
Bosumtwi Crater. 10. Bosumtwi Crater: built of bedrock. The last crater on our tour of impressive impact craters is this located in Ghana, Africa. It is about 10.5 km in diameter and about 1.3 million years old. The crater is filled almost entirely by water, creating Lake Bosumtwi. The lakebed is made of crystalline bedrocks.
Capturing the world's attention: Phoenix (NASA/UA)
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The Phoenix Mars Lander has not communicated since Nov. 2, and engineers from the mission assume the vehicle is now completely out of power. Therefore, at a news conference today, mission managers announced the Phoenix the mission is now officially over. “At this time we’re pretty convinced the vehicle is no longer available for us to use, and we’re declaring the end of the mission,” said Barry Goldstein, Phoenix project manager. “We’ve been surprised by this vehicle before, and we’re still listening. We’ll try to hail Phoenix, but no one has the expectation we’ll hear from it again. We’re completely proud of what we’ve accomplished. We’ve achieved all of the science goals and then some.”
But there’s still more to come from Phoenix, as scientists can now focus fully on analyzing the science data returned by the lander. Could Phoenix have found possible organic substances on Mars?
Peter Smith, Principal Investigator for Phoenix, didn’t rule out the possibility. “We haven’t analyzed the data at that level yet,” he said. “These are subtle signatures. We have the data sets that could reveal that. But until we actually do the work, we can’t say we didn’t find it…I’m still holding out hope here. Its’ really a question of what is the truth on Mars, and we’re trying to make sure we get the right answer here and not come rushing out with a quick analysis. This is very tricky stuff and the data sets are quite complex in regards to organics.”
Tests done by Phoenix didn’t reveal the acid soils Smith and his team were expecting to find, but alkaline salts and perchlorates, which are possible energy sources and nutrients for microbes. Smith doesn’t think there’s anything alive on Mars now, its just too cold. “It’s possible that in a warmer and wetter period on it Mars, it could have been habitable,” he said.
As anticipated, the seasonal decline in sunshine at the arctic landing site is not providing enough sunlight for the solar arrays to collect the power necessary to charge batteries that operate the lander’s instruments. And a dust storm at the landing site made the sunlight decrease even further, ending the mission a little sooner than the team had hoped.
As for any possibility of re-contacting the lander next year when spring returns to Mars’ northern arctic, Goldstein didn’t rule it out, but said its not very likely. “By the mid October (2009) time frame, there would be enough sunlight hitting the solar arrays to create power,” he said. “But its highly unlikely the vehicle will come back. It will be encased in CO2 ice, in temperatures under -150 C. The solar arrays will likely crack and fall off the vehicle,… the electronics will become brittle and break, so the wiring boards won’t work. But this vehicle has behaved so superlatively, we’ll look again in October.”
Look for an official epitaph for Phoenix from Universe Today soon.
An IMB 726, a precursor of the 729 data recorder. Credit: IBM
Old, forgotten data from three Apollo moon missions could help overcome one of the biggest environmental hurdles facing future lunar colonists. Pervasive moon dust can clog equipment, scratch helmet visors –or worse, get inside astronaut lungs and cause serious health problems. But 173 data tapes hold information that could be essential in overcoming the problems the dust causes. The only trouble is that the tapes are archived on “ancient” 1960’s technology and no one could find the right equipment to playback the tapes. However, the Australian Computer Museum has an old IBM729 Mark 5 tape drive that should do the trick, IF the machine can be restored to operable condition again…
The IBM729 Mark 5 tape recorder is about as big as a household refrigerator. It recorded data from Apollo 11, 12 and 14 missions that carried “dust detectors.” Information from the detectors was beamed back to earth and recorded onto tapes. Copies of the tapes were supposedly sent to NASA, but the tapes were lost or misplaced before they could be archived in NASA’s holdings. But the original data tapes have sat in Perth, Australia for almost 40 years.
Physicist Brian O’Brien invented the detectors. He wrote a couple of papers on the information in the 1970’s, but no one was very interested in moon dust back then. However now, scientists realize this information could help make future missions to the moon more feasible.
Apollo astronaut Gene Cernan covered with moon dust. Credit: NASA
“These were the only active measurements of moon dust made during the Apollo missions, and no one thought it was important,” said O’Brien. “But it’s now realised that dust, to quote Harrison Schmitt, who was the last astronaut to leave the moon, is the number one environmental problem on the moon.”
O’Brien quit his work on lunar dust when he left the University of Sydney. Two years ago, someone at NASA remembered the data had been taken, but couldn’t find the duplicate tapes.
O’Brien says there is no indication as to when exactly the tapes were lost, but he guesses that it was “way, way back.” When O’Brien learned of the tape loss, he was contacted by Guy Holmes from a data recovery company who offered to try and extract the information on the old, original tapes. But Holmes realized he needed some old equipment to do the job, and came across the right IBM tape drive at the Australian Computer Museum.
The archaic-looking recorder is in need of refurbishing, however. Holmes jokes that a 1970s Toyota Corolla fan belt could be used to get the recorder up and running.
“The drives are extremely rare, we don’t know of any others that are still operating,” he said.
“It’s going to have to be a custom job to get it working again. It’s certainly not simple, there’s a lot of circuitry in there, it’s old, it’s not as clean as it should be and there’s a lot of work to do.”
Holmes is hopeful of getting the tape recorder working again in January, and then he says it should only take a week to extract information that has been locked away since the early 1970s.
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Chandrayaan-1, India’s first unmanned spacecraft mission to moon, successfully entered lunar orbit on November 8. The spacecraft fired its engines to reduce velocity and enable the Moon’s gravity to capture it; engines were fired for 817 seconds when Chandrayaan-1 was about 500 km away from the moon. Next up for the spacecraft will be to reduce the height of its lunar orbit to about 100 km. Then, on Nov. 14th or 15th, the Moon Impact Probe (MIP) will be launched, and crash into the Moon’s surface (more about the MIP below). If you enjoy watching animations and want to see exactly how the spacecraft attained its lunar orbit, here’s a few animations for you:
A simple animation of how the spacecraft went from its spiraling elliptical orbit around Earth to its now spiraling elliptical orbit around the moon can be found on the India Space Agency’s site. (Sorry, the file was to big to insert here.)
Another quite large animation that was created by Doug Ellison (of UnmannedSpaceflight.com) shows how the X-ray Spectrometer aboard Chandrayaan-1 will work. This one takes a long time to download, but the wait is well worth it: the animation is spectacular.
The spacecraft is now orbiting the moon in an elliptical orbit that passes over the polar regions of the moon. The nearest point of this orbit (perigee) lies at a distance of about 504 km from the moon’s surface while the farthest point (apogee) lies at about 7502 km. Currently, Chandrayaan-1 takes about 11 hours to orbit the moon.
The MIP carries three instruments:
Radar Altimeter – measures the altitude of the probe during descent and for qualifying technologies for future landing missions.
Video Imaging System – acquires close range images of the surface of the Moon during descent. The video imaging system consists of analog CCD camera.
Mass Spectrometer measures the constituents of lunar atmosphere during descent.
