Well, some people find hills, craters, sand and rocks (you forgot the rocks ) interesting, that is why I have been following (as best as I can) all the releases from the current missions on Mars and the Moon.

Sigh wish we had Titan as our moon....................

You'd have nothing but a small, rocky object orbiting us then.

But that would be disastrous for Titan! Please don't bring it this close to the sun. I'd settle for Io though, if someone would like to arrange the swap.

I'm on it!

Then you only have to go to your backyard to see Tvashtar erupting........

Chandrayaan update:
http://www.hindu.com/2008/11/23/stories/2008112356660100.htm

That would be way cool. Maybe you could tell the phase of the moon by how sulfurous things
smelled on Earth. Could be bad for acid rain though.

But of course to pursue the Titan-wouldnt-be-the-Titan-we-know-and-love-if-it-were-at-1AU argument,
Io wouldnt be tidally active if it were in the Moon's orbit around Earth either...

It would be cool, however, to see the Moon 4 billion years ago when it was a LOT closer to Earth,
and of course it was volcanically active itself. And the tides it raised in the Earth's oceans would
have been pretty spectacular.

Unconfirmed reports that Chandrayaan I is facing thermal issues. Not surprising for a first mission to face some issues like this.

The report says that it affected MIP. The MIP thing is already a history. It worked nicely and it acquired some 3000+ images. So 10 deg thing has not hampered the MIP.

The space qualified components should not get affected with just a 10 deg rise.. even the imaging array which IS sensitive to temp should work ok after cooling.. even at 10 deg higher temp it could give degraded S/N and not affect the resolution so at the most the dynamic range of brightness variation capture will be affected.

A serious problem does exist if the temperature rise is due to the operation of payload. however if the temp rise is due to solar heating in certain attidudes then the yaan can be cooled by reorientation and ISRO has ample experience of attending to such circumstances.

They should boldly tell what is the real problem.. and such things are excusable in the first attempt.

Eureka - I have located the MIP images on the Clementine basemap. I'm fairly confident these have to be correct. The spacecraft image track was right down the 14 degrees east meridian. My previous post, above, was too far to the west.

Phil

Click to view attachment

PS - one degree, north to south, is 30 km, so the frames are about 10 km across.

Much more news now:

http://www.isro.org/Chandrayaan/htmls/ImageMoon.htm

Phil

I'd like to add also: The first results from Bulgarian instrument aboard Chandrayaan-1 have been published!

http://www.isro.org/Chandrayaan/htmls/ImageMoon.htm

Not so good... overheating is an issue.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7748611.stm

Phil

So it really affected the orbiter, not MIP...

Just for curiosity, the Moon surface has the temperature of between 130-135 centigrades Celsius on the Equatorial line. Why the Chandrayaan 1 spacecraft surface has around of 50 centigrades Celsius? Is that temperature as an average since its orbit is polar (very hot on the sun face and very cold on the back).

If I'm not mistaken (I probably am), they mean that the spacecraft is 50 degrees hotter than it should be, as opposed to having a temperature of 50 degrees.

They're picking up 1200W/m^2 from the Moon, and 1300 from the Sun??? That doesn't sound right, unless the Moon's albedo is a lot higher than I'd ever dreamed outside of visible wavelengths. Or, are we talking about waste heat from surface re-radiation as a contributing factor?

It appears that ISRO did not anticipate the quantum of heat from Lunar surface, so the spacecraft has cabin temp of 50 deg - 10 deg higher than expected.

Really speaking if that is the cabin temp then it should not be a problem for space qualified components but one possibility is that there may be certain Hot Spots of which ISRO may be weary.

India published a second video of the Moon.

http://www.isro.org/pslv-c11/videos/tmca.htm

But I'm unable to open it

Open it in Internet Explorer. Firefox will not work

Thank you, it works with IE.

Good News...
Chandrayaan working normally: ISRO
Link: http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/busine...us/14261420.htm

That makes no sense.

"working normally" but also "not work on all the payloads at a given time"

"summer on the moon"

"temperature in the moon's atmosphere"

Never has such a short article confused me so much!

Yes, hard to believe isn't it, when phone conversations with Call Centres are always so easy to follow...

I'm not sure I buy into the idea that the lunar atmosphere is causing Chandrayaan-1's problems. The moon has a very low axial tilt, "summer" on the moon is probably quite similar to "winter". Doesn't Chandrayaan-1 orbit well above the lunar atmosphere anyway? And given how tenuous the atmosphere is, could it even really affect Chandrayaan-1's temperature if it were orbiting within it (assuming it didn't hit a mountain or something)?

It's nothing to do with the atmosphere, or summer, or anything else that's been said like that. I don't know whether we are getting really bad journalism, or if ISRO is straining to explain things to an audience it thinks knows nothing about the subject, and straying into very weak explanations. Poor choice of analogy, or things like that.

Phil

It's counterintutive, but yes, the Moon radiates in the IR on the day side a lot. And the huge surface temperature excursions make simple dayside heat rejection hard to do without cooling off too much on the nightside. This was a big challenge for us on LROC as well.

Bad translations at a minimum. The main variable for thermal design is "beta angle", the angle between the sun and the orbit plane. For most systems, beta=0 is the worst/hottest case, so they may be in that geometry now.

Here's an anaglyph made from the first bit of the new movie:

Click to view attachment

I really have no idea what that's trying to say - does the moon even have summer?

I dont think this about lunar summer (whatever that is). This may simply be, as Phil Stooke put it, a problem with their position in relation to the sun and the radiating lunar surface, or their heat management system has a design flaw.

Check out the post on the 'heat issue' at New scientist. Its just as we thought. Isro referred to the current situation as a 'local' summer, not a 'lunar' summer.

Back to the summer issue. I think that what is intended is this: the spacecraft's orbit plane right now is roughly aligned with the sun - i.e. the sun is now in or close to the orbit plane, so the spacecraft fies over the sub-solar longitude on every orbit. Three months from now the orbit will be over the terminators, which will give a lot less heating from the ground. Six months from now, it will be passing over the sub-solar longitude again. Put another way, the orbit plane is fixed in space. It's not like Mars Odyssey etc., crossing the equator at a fixed time of day on every orbit, which requires the orbit plane to rotate during a Mars year.

But summer this is not!

Phil

Isn't that what I said in post #279?

At any rate, does anyone know what the current orbital geometry really is? For some situations beta=90 (constantly over the terminator) could be the worst case, since it will always get solar input on the same side. beta=0 is stressing for lunar IR.

Yes, Mike, it is the same. Just expanding on it a bit,

Phil

some updates on chandrayaan.
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/News/N...how/3773951.cms

... and the standart question - will we ever see more pictures from MIP at all?

I don't want to sound like a pessimist, but we must understand that India is in a state of emergency. Some very close relatives of mine almost got caught up in the situation....

Doc... I just watched the news on TV... is this about a banned topic at UMSF? If so, I understood you...

I think it's fair to say that the Indian authorities and the Indian press have far far bigger issues at the moment. Politics are totally banned from UMSF, so discussion of that subject is not allowed. Patience is called for.

Once again, however, I find myself wondering why people post here asking when people who have nothing to do with the forum will release something.

Surely because they hope that those 'with nothing to do with the forum' might perchance be keeping an eye on it and thereby become aware of the public appetite for their data. I think that's not a bad thing, maybe over-optimistic in some cases, but who knows? It may sometimes work. In your place I'd take it as a compliment.

direct link mms://msrv2.wstream.net/isro_archive/TMC02.wmv (copy and paste in your browser)

More Chandrayaan images http://www.isro.org/pslv-c11/photos/moon_images.htm

Nice video! Is it real? Or computer animated? I thought it might be computer animated, but I'm really not very sure. It keeps lagging on my computer with a horribly low frame rate. =|
Where can I download the video?

India ( ISRO ) has officially given two videos on their website :

http://www.isro.org/pslv-c11/videos/tmc.htm

and

http://www.isro.org/pslv-c11/videos/tmca.htm

But dowload is really painful from their own site.

It is available on youtube : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDaY4p6WO6w

The version on YouTube is described as a "fly through". To me this means a computer-generated journey through a 3-D computer-constructed landscape, whihc inthis case is generated using real moon images. What's more, it seeme to be too low to be the real orbital altitude.

Yes indeed, a flythrough of a computer-generated 3D landscape, like the Kaguya movies we have seen - Tycho, Alpine Valley etc. Let's hope we get the descent movie from the impact probe soon! I'm still trying to reconcile the various reports on the impact site - some say inside Shackleton, others 32 km from Shackleton...

Phil

Excuse me if I have I have missed something, as I've been visiting the Chicxulub area ... (place-name dropping, I know).

But...has anyone manged to "nest" the two descent images inside one another? I failed, after turning one round by about 180 degrees so the two sun directions correspond.

They are not nested - the camera was looking sideways, not forwards. I have posted an image showing their locations above in this thread (post 261).

Phil

Nice job, thanks. Not easy, with the different illuminations between Clementine and MIP.