The Hindu Business Line : Chandrayaan-1 enters lunar orbit

Bangalore, Nov. 8 The first Indian lunar craft crossed the big test and entered moon’s orbit on Saturday. Scientists commanding it from the Spacecraft Control Centre here made a 77-minute orbit manoeuvring exercise to put it within 500 km of the lunar surface.

With this, ISRO said, India becomes the fifth country to send a spacecraft to moon, after the former Soviet Union, the US, Japan and China. ISTRAC scientists began the sixth, lengthiest and most complex operation of the mission — the ‘lunar orbit insertion manoeuvre’ — at 4.51 p.m. by firing at the onboard motors. They nudged it into an elliptical orbit 500 X 7,500 km around moon. The ISRO release said the spacecraft would take about 11 hours to go round the moon once in the orbit.

“This is the most crucial move of the lunar mission,” ISRO’s spokesman, Mr S. Satish, said. Over the next 2-3 days, the control centre will further fire the motors to slow it down and ease it gradually, first to a 100 km X 500 km orbit and finally into a circular 100 km X 100 km orbit for the next two years.

Pictures of earth

The performance of all the systems onboard Chandrayaan-1 is normal. The Terrain Mapping Camera, one of the 11 scientific instruments of the spacecraft, has been opened twice to take pictures of the earth and moon.

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