MOM At Mars, Mission Operations Options

[nprev]

Successful insertion!!!!! Congratulations to ISRO!!!!

[Astro0]

That's two for two this week!! And now seven spacecraft operating at Mars!!

CanberraDSN (along with Goldstone) acquired the signal confirming that ISRO's Mars Orbiter Mission successfully made orbit



Accomplishment Unlocked!

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Apparently only available as a Facebook link right now, but this is the first image (and it's nice.)

[djellison]

By my guessing it's approx 1100 x 850km, the southern end of Syrtis Major - about 72E, 2S in the center.

Attached thumbnail(s)

 

[nprev]

And you call that "guessing"... Great context!

Seems to have a bit of motion blur is all, but that may be a subjective impression on my part.

[Astro0]

Just posting the first image here.



From ISRO's twitter: 1st image of Mars, from a height of 7300 km; with 376m spatial resolution.

[kenny]

A great first photo ... and in colour! The spacecraft and instruments are still in commissioning phase, so hopefully image resolution will improve later.

Initial orbit is 421.7 km by 76,994 km, at an inclination to Mars’ equatorial plane of 150 degrees. Orbital period is 72 hours 52 minutes. The periapsis was
predicted to be 515km after the last course correction, so it came in a little low.

The BBC and CNN have been reporting along the following lines:

“ (CNN) -- India's Mars Orbiter Mission successfully entered Mars' orbit Wednesday morning, becoming the first nation to arrive on its first attempt and the
first Asian country to reach the Red Planet. “

In fact, Mars Express made ESA the first nation/ region to succeed at its first attempt. Both Japan (Nozomi) and China (Yinghuo 1) have attempted
Mars probes which failed. So this is a major first for India, in Asia’s “mini space race”.

[nprev]

MOD MODE: Reminder to all members that rule 1.2 will be enforced, and posts that violate that rule will be deleted without warning.

Mod hat off. Let's please celebrate achievements here on their own merits instead of making essentially futile comparisons of the "first", "better", etc. variety, which never seem to accomplish anything but raising tensions.

MOM is a remarkable achievement thus far, and it seems as if we'll have a considerable amount of not only new imagery but also new science data to talk about in short order. Good stuff.

[elakdawalla]

A second photo. This one is actually at the camera's full resolution of 2048 pixels square! Can anybody identify the location?

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[Julius]

A second photo. This one is actually at the camera's full resolution of 2048 pixels square! Can anybody identify the location?

It's the southern hemisphere for sure but I wouldn't dare say exactly where

[machi]

It shows boundary between Terra Sabaea and Arabia Terra (it's mostly Terra Sabaea). The biggest visible crater is Tikhonravov.
EDIT: I uploaded improved graphics, older version was deleted.

Attached thumbnail(s)

 

[Phil Stooke]

Good for you! You're right. I was looking but hadn't found it yet. And it's in the northern hemisphere (sorry Julius!)

Appropriately, the small feature Indus Vallis is in this area, as the map shows.

Phil

[Phil Stooke]

Playing with the ISRO image (Thanks, ISRO!) to bring out the surface features a bit better:



Phil

[4throck]

Phil, that last image looks like something from Mariner 4!

Nice to see the images being released fast.
Also good color balance / correction for first images.

I think the camera is a bit out of focus, but that's expected for such an early mission phase.

[MarsInMyLifetime]

I think the camera is a bit out of focus, but that's expected for such an early mission phase.

I worked with the hi-def image a bit. The saturation is probably higher than true color. The color histogram clearly shows the peaks of primary red, green, and blue contributions; playing with these channels brought out different limb features, although there I could not be certain I was seeing true layers or the contribution of the very heavy compression blocks. My impression is that this image is probably a better representation of the mission's atmospheric research goals than of the general photographic capability of the camera--playing with levels pretty much kills the limb structure. Data with more gray scale and less compression will tell a better story of the geologic capabilities of the camera.