The Planetary Society Blog
By Emily Lakdawalla
Kaguya self-portraits
Sep. 17, 2007 | 09:20 PDT | 16:20 UTC
Kaguya continues to operate nominally. On Saturday, JAXA released two way-cool images taken by the spacecraft to document the successful deployment of two critical components, its high-gain antenna (for communications with Earth) and its solar paddle. Kaguya self-portrait: High-gain antennaAbout eight hours after launch, Kaguya deployed its high-gain antenna and solar paddle. A few hours later, the spacecraft took a photo to document the position of the antenna using its onboard camera. Credit: JAXA | Kaguya self-portrait: High-gain antenna (diagram)This diagram shows the geometry of the camera and high-gain antenna when Kaguya's onboard camera took a photo of the antenna to confirm its successful deployment. "SOL-BC" is a part of Kaguya's X-ray spectrometer, which is protruding into the camera's field of view. Credit: JAXA | Kaguya self-portrait: Solar paddleAbout eight hours after launch, Kaguya deployed its high-gain antenna and solar paddle. A few hours later, the spacecraft took a photo to document the position of the paddle using its onboard camera. The triangle shape visible in the image is a truss that supports the paddle, which is extremely foreshortened from this point of view. Credit: JAXA |
I'm at a loss to explain why I think spacecraft self-portraits are so cool. I guess they're cool because they document the fact that something we humans built really is out there in space or on another planet. That's a fact that we all know, of course; if the spacecraft is returning data at all, it must be out there. But something about seeing a picture of the spacecraft out there is much more emotionally powerful.
Other Kaguya news: following these successful deployments, on September 14, the spacecraft has also successfully performed the first of three course-correcting maneuvers that will set the spacecraft up to inject into lunar orbit on October 3. The next two maneuvers will take place on September 19 and September 30.
Finally, Cherilynn sent me a huge pile of photos to post in her launch blog; go check them out!
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