Chandrayaan-1 enters lunar orbit

India's Chandrayaan-1 has successfully entered lunar orbit by firing its thrusters between 17:00 and 18:00 hours IST on Novemebr 8 and is all set to launch the moon impacter probe on November 14th or 15th.

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 currently in a elliptical polar orbit around the moon and is expected to settle in a orbital altitude of 100km in the next few days.

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.

Here's how it all happened,

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.

Here's the orbit of the space craft,


This was the intitial orbit decided by the scientists,



But in a last minute change they changed it to five elliptical orbits with increasing apogee.



And some of the beautiful images of earth captured by the space craft,





Cool images

Images of the moon have also been taken and are expected to be released soon.

Useful Links:
www.universetoday.com...

www.universetoday.com...

www.universetoday.com...

www.universetoday.com...

The official website of chandrayaan,

www.isro.org...

Stay tuned.

[edit on 8/11/08 by peacejet]

Great info, thanks for packaging it up neatly for us

I love the pics of the earth that have come from it so far, and I am SO looking forward to the moon shots, as well. It's a pretty exciting time for moon exploration, isn't it? Between Japan's probe sending images, the Indian shots upcoming, and all it's nice for us Wannabe astronauts lol

Go India! Welcome to the new frontier!

Thanks for the informative post, OP. I just love reading about this stuff.

I will post images of the moon here as soon as it is available.

This is not a one liner.

One can only hope they are more forthcoming with their data, not like the American, Chinese, Russian, or worse, Japanese scientists.

I wouldn't be surprised if they released a few images- then stop.

I see major trade concessions for India in the coming weeks...