Saturday, January 24, 2009

Chandrayaan beams back 40,000 images in 75 days

Chandrayaan-1 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 mostly of craters

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