Chandrayaan-1, India’s first unmanned lunar mission spacecraft, at last reached its final destination, the lunar orbit, at 3,84,000 km away from Earth. Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) launched the spacecraft in the wee hours of October 22 last and it reached the lunar orbit 100 km away from moon’s surface on November 12. The spacecraft is now orbiting the moon and is busy performing its assigned tasks. Expressing extreme satisfaction over the whole issue, the mission Project Director M. Annadurai said, “The entire team is very happy that in three weeks from the launch on October 22, we could safely send Chandrayaan-1 to the moon without any hiccups”.

Chandrayaan-1 is carrying 11 scientific instruments contributed by India and other international agencies. India’s instruments include Terrain Mapping Camera (TMC), Lunar Laser Ranging Instrument (LLRI), and High Energy X-ray Spectrometer (HEX). TMC will “map topography in both near and far side of the Moon and prepare a three-dimensional atlas with high spatial and altitude resolution”; LLRI is “to provide ranging data for determining accurate altitude of the spacecraft above the lunar surface”; and the HEX is “the first experiment to carry out spectral studies of planetary surface at hard X-ray energies using good energy resolution detectors”.

After successfull arrival of the spacecraft to its designated orbit, describing the incident as fulfilling of mission, S.K. Shivakumar, Director, ISRO Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network (ISTRAC), Bangalore said, “We were given the job of sending a spacecraft to the moon. We have realised the mission”. ISRO’s Spacecraft Control Centre (SCC) at ISTRAC is working as the nerve centre for the current mission and it radioed a signal on Nov 12 at 6.33 pm to the Liquid Apogee Motor (LAM) of Chandrayaan-1 to fire to take the spacecraft to its final home, the lunar orbit. After successfully firing for 58 seconds, the engine reduced the spacecraft’s aposelene (furthest distance from moon) to about 100 km. One day ago, on Tuesday, periselene of Chandrayaan-1 was already reduced to 100 km.

In order to “detect water ice in the permanently shadowed regions on the lunar poles”, NASA has sent a Miniature Synthetic Aperture Radar (Mini-SAR) on-board Chandrayaan-1. Besides. NASA has also included a Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) tasking with the mapping of “lunar surface mineralogy in the context of lunar geologic evolution”.