Chandrayaan Lunar Mission

leinad (Dan) · #1 22-10-2008, 04:27 PM

http://www.chandrayaan-i.com/

Well India has just launched its unmanned moon mission.

I was wondering, would we be able to see the satellite from our backyard scopes whilst its in orbit around the moon ?

Octane (Humayun) · #2 22-10-2008, 09:56 PM

Scouting for a call centre.

h0ughy (David) · #3 22-10-2008, 11:29 PM

LOL Humayan - no phone spamming laws on the moon. Lookin forward to see what they can do

Jeff · #4 22-10-2008, 11:31 PM

You might struggle to see it with your scopes. The bigest and best Earth based telescopes can rarely see anything small than 1 arc second. With the moon an average of about 385,000km away, the satellite would need to be almost 2km in size to be seen .... even photographically.

Even the Hubble telescope with its 2.4m mirror and effective resolution down to about 0.1 arc second would fail see anything below about 200m in diameter. Maybe if they added your 5x Powermate to the Hubble ?