The Rs 386-crore Indian Moon mission, Chandrayaan-1, which completes a flawless 100 days around January 30 has transmitted more than 40,000 images of different types since its launch on October 22, 2008, which many in ISRO believe is quite a record compared to the lunar flights of other nations.
ISRO officials estimated that if more than 40,000 images have been transmitted by Chandrayaan's cameras in 75 days, it worked out to nearly 535 images being sent daily. They are first transmitted to Indian Deep Space Network at Byalalu near Bangalore, from where they are flashed to ISRO's telemetry, tracking and command network at Bangalore.
They said some of these images have a resolution of up to five metres providing a sharp and clear picture of the Moon's surface. On the other hand, they said many images sent by some of the other missions had a 100-metre resolution.
On November 26, the indigenous Terrain Mapping Camera, which was first activated on October 29, 2008, took shots of peaks along with craters. This came as a surprise to ISRO officials because the Moon consists largely only of craters.
Buoyed by the success of Chandrayaan-1, ISRO is now planning a more ambitious lunar venture around 2020 after the Chandrayaan-2 in 2012: a manned mission. This was stated by none other than the man behind India's maiden lunar mission, Mylswamy Annadurai, Chandrayaan-1's project director, while speaking to TOI recently.
Annadurai said around 2015, ISRO is embarking on a manned mission to the low earth orbit, which is 2000 km above the Earth. "An Indian on the Moon is, therefore, certainly the next logical step and ISRO is definitely considering it,'' he said.
With regards to Chandrayaan-1, a meeting of all the principal investigators of the different scientific experiments is being held in Bangalore on January 29 to review the preliminary results.
Source : Times Of India
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