The Hindu Business Line : Chandrayaan-1 reaches lunar slot

Bangalore, Nov. 12 Indian space scientists on Wednesday ‘lassoed’ Moon exactly three weeks since they sent up the lunar orbiter mission Chandrayaan-1.

The lunar craft is now in its planned path 100 km from the lunar surface, ISRO announced here.

The next major upcoming event of the mission is the release of the 29-kg Moon Impact Probe from the spacecraft anytime between now and November 15. MIP will hit lunar surface but capture its vital scenes during its 25-minute descent. It also has the Tricolour painted on it, heralding India’s arrival on Moon some 50 years after the first man-made Russian probes.

Chandrayaan-1 now circles Moon once in two hours pole to pole. Over the next two years, it will go round Moon taking pictures of its topography and studying its mineral content and distribution. It now weighs 675 kg, nearly half of its launch weight.

The Rs 386-crore mission that was taken up three years back is ISRO’s first deep-space probe and the most ambitious to date. ISRO plans to build on this and next send a second lunar lander with Russia in two years; a human mission around Earth by 2015 and a Mars mission.

“Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft has successfully reached its intended operational orbit at a height of about 100 km from the lunar surface. This followed a series of three orbit reduction manoeuvres conducted during the past three days by repeatedly firing the spacecraft’s 440-Newton liquid engine” for a total of 16 minutes, the space agency said in a release. It was lowered from a distance 7,500 km to the lunar surface gradually to 500 km and 200 km and finally 100 km. In the 21 days since October 22, scientists at the ISTRAC Spacecraft Control Centre here totally fired the engine ten times successfully.

“With this, the complex and carefully planned sequence of operations to carry Chandrayaan-1 from its initial Earth orbit to its intended operational lunar orbit has been successfully completed.”

It will conduct chemical, mineralogical and photo geological mapping of Moon with the 11 scientific instruments onboard. Two of them, the Terrain Mapping Camera and the Radiation Dose Monitor, have already been switched on.

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