Chandrayaan-1 Successfully Enters lunar Orbit

This news updete by www.zeenews.com



Bangalore: India’s most ambitious moon mission, Chandrayaan-1, entered the lunar orbit at 5.04 pm on Saturday. The entry into the elliptical orbit of the moon, considered the most difficult part of the mission, was executed to perfection. Chandrayaan-1 has now been stabilised at an altitude of 504 kms from the surface of the moon.

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The Chandrayaan-1’s lunar orbit insertion (LOI) started around 5.00 pm and lasted around 800 seconds. With the entry into the lunar orbit, the craft is now in the moon’s gravitational field and is in a 7,500 km X 500 km elliptical orbit around the moon and will take 10 hours to complete one revolution.

The LOI manoeuvre was tricky and involved danger because in this the craft had to traverse through an area where the earth and moon’s gravitational forces nearly cancel each other out. So, even a slight deviation could mean the end of the mission – the spacecraft could crash towards either the moon or earth, or embark on a course leading into deep space. Heaving a sigh of relief, ISRO chief G Madhavan Nair said today's operation was the "most critical moment" in the mission.

"We ha ve done it," a visbly happy Nair declared.

"For the last 20 minutes, almost all our hearts were at a standStill," Nair said from a ground centre near Bangalore.

The lunar probe launch in itself will be a complex manoeuvre. Firstly, the craft will be gradually lowered to an altitude of 100 kms from the surface of the moon. The craft then will launch a probe, towards the surface of the moon, within the next 48 hours.

The last orbit-raising manoeuvres to enter the lunar transfer trajectory were completed on Tuesday by the Spacecraft Control Centre at ISRO Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network (ISTRAC) in Bangalore.

According to space experts, nearly 30% of unmanned moon missions of the US and the former USSR failed while being put into moon’s orbit.





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