Date:16/11/2008 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2008/11/16/stories/2008111661200800.htm

National

First 3-D image of Moon on Monday

Staff Reporter

Bangalore: A year from now the world will have the most detailed three-dimensional image of the Moon, complete with the precise location of its craters and mountains, thanks to Chandrayaan-1. And the first 3-D picture of the Moon’s terrain, taken by the Terrain Mapping Camera (TMC) on board Chandrayaan, will be processed by Monday, according to M. Annadurai, project director of Chandrayaan-1.

“This is the next big event for the mission,” Mr. Annadurai told The Hindu. “This stereoscopic image, with its five-metre resolution, will set Chandrayaan apart from the previous lunar missions, and will be one of its most important contributions to science.”

The images that would be obtained on Monday would be those taken around the Moon’s equator, he said. The pictures from the TMC’s three cameras would be overlaid to create this 3-D image. Within a year and a half all the images collected from the TMC would be “stitched together” to create a Moon globe, Mr. Annadurai said.

The TMC, one of 11 payloads on board Chandrayaan, has already produced a much-celebrated picture of the Earth on October 29 taken from a distance of 9,000 km. It has been capturing images of the Moon since November 13 from a height of 100 km from the lunar surface.

Clearer images

The images would be clearer than the other previous lunar missions, said S.K. Shivakumar, director of ISRO Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network (ISTRAC).

“The highest resolution images of the Moon so far have been those taken by the Japanese space probe Kaguya earlier this year.” The TMC cameras would work for two months continuously, with a gap of six months in between, as they would be driven by the condition of illumination, said Mr. Shivakumar.

On Sunday, Chandrayaan’s next scientific experiment would be switched on: The Hyper Spectral Imager (HySI) would create a mineralogical map of the lunar surface and help in understanding the mineralogical composition of the Moon’s interior. “The two sets of images — those captured by the HySI and the TMC — will be overlaid to create an accurate picture of where the minerals are located,” said Mr. Annadurai.

By the end of the month, all the payloads would be operational. These included the Lunar Laser Ranging Instrument (LLRI) and High Energy X-ray Spectrometer (HEX), said Mr. Shivakumar.