The first orbit-raising manoeuvre of Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft was performed at 09:00 hrs Indian Standard Time (IST) on Thursday morning (October 23) when the spacecraft's 440 Newton liquid engine was fired for about eighteen minutes by commanding the spacecraft from Spacecraft Control Centre (SCC) at ISRO Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network (ISTRAC) at Peenya, Bangalore.
With this engine firing, Chandrayaan-1's apogee (farthest point to Earth) has been raised to 37,900 km, while its perigee (closest point to the Earth) has been raised a little, to 305 km. In this orbit, Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft takes about eleven hours to go round the Earth once.
India's first space craft to the Moon Chandrayaan-1 (name of the Moon craft in Sanskrit) was launched by PSLV-C11 rocket on October 22, 2008, morning from Satish Dhawan Space Centre, Sriharikota, 80 km from Chennai, but on the Andhra Pradesh coast.
The almost ten-storey high four-stage rocket placed Chandrayaan-1 in an elliptical orbit with a perigee of 255 km and apogee of 22,860 km. In this initial orbit, Chandrayaan-1 orbited the Earth once in about six and a half hours.
Following its successful launch, the SCC acquired the first signals and conducted preliminary operations on Chandrayaan-1. The Deep Space Network (DSN) at Bylalu village near Bangalore tracked the spacecraft in this orbit and received signals in S and X band and has sent commands to the spacecraft.
An Indian Space Research Organisation [ISRO] press release on Thursday quoting senior officials said all systems onboard the spacecraft are functioning normally. Further orbit raising manoeuvers are planned in the coming few days.
ISRO Chairman Madhavan Nair has indicated that that spacecraft will be injected into the lunar trajectory around November 8. The 1,308-kg spacecraft is carrying eleven payloads -- five ISRO and the other from international agencies like NASA, European Space Agency and the Bulgarian aerospace agency.
The two-year unmanned mission to the Moon, four lakh km away, will survey the lunar surface to produce a complete map of its chemical characteristics and 3-dimensional topography.
Scientists hope that the data relayed by the spacecraft will throw some more light in understanding the origins of the solar system in general and the Moon in particular, especially its mineral and water content.
Some of the instruments in the spacecraft are: the Terrain Mapping Camera (TMC) to produce a high-resolution map of the Moon; the Hyper Spectral Imager (HySI) to perform mineralogical mapping; the Lunar Laser Ranging Instrument (LLRI) will determine the surface topography. An X-ray fluorescence spectrometer to monitor solar flux and a High
Energy X-ray/gamma ray spectrometer to measure degassing and other radioactive elements.
Among foreign tech centres participating in this Indian Moon mission are Brown University, NASA-funded Jet Propulsion Lab, Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Polish Academy of Science and University of Bergen, Naval Air Warfare Center, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and Sandia National
Laboratories.
The spacecraft is mainly powered by its solar array, which includes one solar panel covering a total area of 2.15 x 1.8 m2 generating 700W of power, which is stored in a 36 A/h Lithium-ion battery and it also uses a bipropellant integrated propulsion system to reach lunar orbit as well as orbit and attitude maintenance while orbiting the Moon.
The Russian space agency is in talks with ISRO for Chandrayaan-2 project where ISRO hopes to land a motorised rover on the Moon in two or three years from now. The 30kg to 100kg rover will be designed to move on wheels on the lunar surface, pick up samples of soil or rocks, do in situ chemical analysis and send the data to the mother-spacecraft Chandrayaan II, orbiting above it and in transmit data back to the Earth.
The Moon Impact Probe (MIP), made by ISRO scientists, will be ejected once it reaches 100 km orbit around the Moon; MIP also has a high resolution mass spectrometer, an S-Band altimeter and a video camera. The interesting feature with the MIP is that it carries a picture of the Indian national flag making India the fourth to plant a flag on the Moon after Russia, USA and Japan.
No comments:
Post a Comment