KAGUYA Update: At 2:20 PM, Pacific Daylight Time yesterday, the Kaguya spacecraft successfully entered orbit around the Moon. Since its launch on September 13, Kaguya has spent the last few weeks refining its trajectory as it prepared for insertion into lunar orbit. It will still be more than two weeks—on October 19—till the satellite settles into its final circular orbit 100 kilometers (around 62 miles) above the Moon. Shown above is a still image taken by the high-definition television camera onboard Kaguya. The HDTV camera is the first ever to be sent as far as 110,000 km (or 68,350 miles) into deep space, and is expected to beam back crisp video footage of the Moon and even the Earth setting and rising above its surface. The Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK) provided the TV camera.
The Earth footage was taken on September 29 at 9:46 PM, Japan Standard Time. It was transmitted back to the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) on September 30. Below is an image of the HDTV camera prior to being installed onto the Kaguya spacecraft during the assembly phase.
JAXA / NHK
KAGUYA Blog Entries Archive:
April 11, 2007
September 5, 2007
September 13, 2007
UPDATE (October 9): JAXA released this cool little animated gif showing Kaguya approaching the Moon prior to lunar orbit insertion (LOI) on October 3. Pretty awesome.
JAXA
UPDATE #2 (October 13): JAXA also released this animated gif of Kaguya deploying its two mini-satellites, Okina (on the left) and Ouna (the one on the right) on October 9 and 12, respectively. Also cool.
JAXA
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