Taken from a height of 7300 km.
By Dileep Thekkethil
BANGALORE: India’s maiden Mars mission Mangalyaan has sent the first 3D image of the red planet captured using the high definition Mars Color Camera on-board the spacecraft. The 3D image of Mars was uploaded on the official Twitter and Facebook pages of ISRO.
The 3D image was generated using multiple images taken with the Mars Color Camera of MOM from an altitude of nearly 74,500 km. As mentioned in the post, space enthusiasts will have to look at the image using a 3D glass to get the three dimensional view of Mars.
What sorcery is this? Get your 3D glasses
to look at Mars the way I do! pic.twitter.com/
eWBN7MaBMS
— ISRO’s Mars Orbiter (@MarsOrbiter) September 30, 2014
ISRO official statement said “ISRO’s Mars Orbiter Mission captures its first image of Mars. Taken from a height of 7300 km; with 376 m spatial resolution.”
The camera was designed and developed in the Ahmedabad-based Space Application Centre of ISRO. During the speech delivered by Prime Minister Narendra Modi after the successful ejection of MOM, he had mentioned about the hard labor put in by the team in Ahmedabad, during his tenure as the Chief Minister of Gujarat.
Mars Orbiter Mission is currently circling the elliptical orbit of Mars at a distance as near as 421.7 Km. It takes Mangalyaan 72 hours, 51 minutes and 51 seconds to complete one rotation around the red planet.
Mangalyaan was launched from Satish Dhawan Space Centre SHAR, Sriharikota, Andhra Pradesh, on November 5, 2013 using PSLV launcher. The spacecraft spent one month orbiting the earth later to be moved into a heliocentric trajectory toward Mars after undergoing a series of earth bound manoeuvres..
Mangalyaan reached the Martian Orbit on September 24 as scheduled and India became the first Asian country to successfully complete the maiden Mars mission.