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



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