Chandrayaan-1 Looks at Earth

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The Indian spacecraft Chandrayaan-1 turned its cameras toward the Earth for a test.  As you can see in the image above, the results speak for themselves.

The commands to configure the spacecraft and cameras for the test shot were sent to the spacecraft from the spacecraft Control Centre of ISRO Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network at Bangalore.  The first images was received by the Indian Deep Space network at Byalalu and were processed by the Indian Space Science Data Center.

The image above shows the Northern coast of Australia from an altitude of 5,592 miles (9,000 km) and the second image, click here for the second (59k), shows Australia’s Southern coast from 43,496 miles (70,000 km).

Wondering about those distances?  The spacecraft is currently in a highly elliptical orbit coming as close as 289 miles (465 km) before zooming out 164,663 miles (265,000 km), taking six days to make one orbit.

Today (November 3) the orbit will be raised to 239,849 miles (386,000 km) if all is well with the spacecraft, and so far things seem to be going great.

In just five days on November 8, the Chandrayaan-1 will be placed in its final orbit which will be only 62 miles (100 km) from the lunar surface.

Go to the Indian Space Research Organisation - Full press release and full-res versions of the imagtes too.