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

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.

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.

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.