October 22, 2008 was a great day for India, especially for the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), when it successfully launched it’s first unmanned moon mission spacecraft Chandrayaan-1. PSLV-C11 was used to place the 1380 kg spacecraft, laced with international research instruments including a high-resolution camera, into the earth’s elliptical orbit.

The moon probe Chandrayaan-1 has helped India looking beyond the space-horizon. Scientists at ISRO became too proud when the first image of Earth taken by the optical sensor fitted at Chandrayaan-1 reached at their hands. Images sent by the spacecraft are of high quality and indicate normal operation of Chandrayaan-1, said a media release.

The terrain-mapping camera placed onboard moon spacecraft Chandrayaan-1 is capable of taking black and white shots of Earth from space and it is doing well in this direction, said ISRO. The images sent are continuously being monitored back at home in order to assess health of the probe relentlessly. First of these images showing Australia’s northern coast area was shot from a height of 9,000 km on Oct 29 at 8 am. Southern coast of Australia was captured in the second image taken from a height of 70,000 km at 12:30 pm on the same day.

According to ISRO, “The camera was operated through a series of commands from the spacecraft control centre of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO)’s telemetry, tracking and command network (Istrac)”. The deep space network (DSN) at Byalalu is receiving the celestial images. “Analysis of the images conducted by Istrac’s data centre confirmed excellent performance of the camera, one of the 11 scientific instruments onboard the spacecraft. The device has a resolution of five meters,” they added.