Kalam happy over photographs taken by Chandrayaan I

Bangalore, Nov 1 (UNI) Former President A P J Abdul Kalam today expressed happiness over the first photographs of Earth taken by the Terrain Mapping Camera by Chandrayaan-1, India's maiden moon mission.

Mr Kalam, who has been closely associated with the country's space programmes, said he had seen the first pictures of the Earth, shown to him by ISRO Chairman Madhavan Nair.

''They are good pictures. They are high-resolution pictures,'' he said on the sidelines of a function organised to mark the launch of an emergency response service in Karnataka.

''The photographs are indicative of what things hold out for us in future,'' he added.

On the moon mission, he said, ''every Indian should be proud about the success of the mission.'' The terrain mapping camera on board India's first unmanned lunar spacecraft Chandrayaan-1 took black and white shots of the Earth from deep space. The camera was operated through a series of commands from the spacecraft control centre of ISRO's Telemetry Tracking and Command Network here.

The first imagery was taken from an altitude of 9000 km above the Earth and the second from 70,000 km.

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