Chandrayaan 1 Successful

Chandrayaan-1, India's first unmanned spacecraft mission to moon, entered lunar orbit in days (November 8, 2008). It is the first time that an Indian-built spacecraft that have broken out of Earth's gravitational field and reached the moon. This historic event took place after the firing of Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft liquid engine at 16:51 IST for a period of 817 seconds. The very complex 'lunar path insertion maneuver "was conducted from Chandrayaan-1 Spacecraft Control Center for the ISRO Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network at Bangalore.

Indian Deep Space Network (IDSN) at Byalalu supported the important task to send commands and regular monitoring of this crucial event with two parabolic antennas, one measuring 18 feet and the other 32 m.

Chandrayaan-1's liquid engine was fired when the spacecraft passed at a distance of about 500 km from the moon to reduce its speed to the moon's gravity to capture it into an orbit around the moon. The spacecraft is now orbiting the moon in an elliptical orbit that passes over the polar regions of the moon. The nearest point on the track (periselene) lies at a distance of approximately 504 km from the lunar surface, while the farthest point (aposelene) is around 7502 km. Chandrayaan-1 takes about 11 hours to go round the moon again in this circuit.

The performance of all the systems aboard Chandrayaan-1 is normal. In the coming days, will the height of Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft's orbit around the moon carefully reduced in steps to reach a final polar orbit about 100 km height from the lunar surface. After this, the Moon Impact Probe (MIP) of the spacecraft is released to hit the lunar surface. Later, the other scientific instruments turned on sequentially, leading to the normal phase of the mission.

It will be recalled that Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft was launched on 22 October 2008 by PSLV-C11 from India's Spaceport at the Satish Dhawan Space Center (SDSC) SHAR, Sriharikota. Smooth, PSLV placed the spacecraft into a highly oval track with a perigee (nearest point to earth) of 255 km and an APOGEE (farthest point to earth) of 22,860 kilometers. In the last two weeks, was the fluid motor Chandrayaan-1 fired five times at the opportune moment to increase APOGEE height, first to 37,900 kilometers, then to 74,715 kilometers, then to 164,600 kilometers, then to 267,000 km and finally to 380,000 km, as planned . During this period, the terrain was Mapping Camera (TMC), one of the eleven payloads (scientific instruments), the spacecraft has successfully run twice to take pictures only of the earth, and saw the moon.

With today's successful maneuver, India becomes the fifth country to send a spacecraft to the moon. The other countries who have sent spacecraft to the moon, the U.S., former Soviet Union, Japan and China. Furthermore, the European Space Agency (ESA), a consortium of 17 countries, also sent a spacecraft to the moon.