The Indian Space Research Organisation said on Friday that terrific shots of earth from space in black and white have been taken by the terrain mapping camera onboard India's first unmanned lunar spacecraft Chandrayaan-1.

In a statement issued by the space agency it said, “The camera was operated through a series of commands from the spacecraft control centre of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO)'s telemetry, tracking and command network (Istrac) here. The images were received by the deep space network (DSN) at Byalalu.”

The TMC took the first picture on 29th October at 8 a.m. from a height of 9,000 km, which displays the northern coast of Australia. After this, the second picture it took shows the southern coast of Australia, which was taken at 12:30 p.m. from a height of 70,000 km.

The statement added, “Analysis of the images conducted by Istrac's data centre confirmed excellent performance of the camera, one of the 11 scientific instruments onboard the spacecraft. The device has a resolution of five meters.”

The hyper spectral imager (HySI), lunar laser ranging instrument (LLRI), high energy x-ray spectrometre (HEX) and the moon impact probe (MIP), are the other four Indian payloads of Chandrayaan-1.

NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), ESA (European Space Agency) and from Bulgaria are the providers of the remaining six payloads.

Making its way into the lunar orbit, Chandrayaan-I from past Wednesday had been orbiting around the earth at 267,000 km apogee (farthest from earth) and 465 km perigee (nearest to earth).

The statement added, “In this orbit, Chandrayaan takes about six days to go round the earth once. The spacecraft performance is being monitored and its health is normal.”