India’s space agency has received the first images taken by one of the key scientific instruments on board the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft on its voyage to the moon.
The indigenously-built Terrain Mapping Camera on Wednesday snapped black-and-white images of Australia’s northern and southern coasts from heights of 9,000 km and 70,000 km, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) said in a statement.
The camera is designed to map the topography of the near and far sides of the moon and prepare a three-dimensional atlas of the lunar surface with a resolution of 5 metres.
“Analysis of the first imagery received by the Indian Deep Space Network at Byalalu and later processed by Indian Space Science Data Centre confirms excellent performance of the camera,” the statement said.
The Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, which was launched on October 22, is being propelled to the moon in a number of stages. In four orbit-raising exercises which involve firing Chandrayaan-1’s onboard motors, ISRO has raised the spacecraft to an orbit whose apogee, or farthest point from the earth, is 2.67 lakh km. Its perigee, or nearest point from earth, is at 465 km.
The fifth firing of the motor on November 3 will push the craft to an apogee of 3.84 lakh km. The moon is at a distance of about 4 lakh km from earth. Eventually, the probe will be placed in a circular orbit 100 km above the lunar surface for the duration of its two-year mission.
“The spacecraft performance is being continuously monitored and is normal,” ISRO said. The Terrain Mapping Camera is one of 11 scientific payloads on the craft. The other four Indian instruments are the Hyper Spectral Imager to gather information about minerals on the moon; the Lunar Laser Ranging Instrument to prepare an elevation map and the High Energy X-ray Spectrometer to identify possible water or ice deposits.
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