Chandrayaan-2: ISRO posts 1st illuminated image of Moon

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), released the first illuminated image of the moon's surface captured by Chandrayaan-2's Imaging Infrared Spectrometer (IIRS) payload, on Thursday.

"IIRS is designed to measure reflected sunlight from the lunar surface in narrow and contiguous spectral channels," ISRO tweeted.

The lunar farside in the northern hemisphere is shown in the picture, along with the Sommerfield, Stebbins and Kirkwood craters.

ISRO mentioned in a statement that the IIRS' main role is to decipher the "origin and evolution of the Moon in a geologic context by mapping the lunar surface mineral and volatile composition using signatures in the reflected solar spectrum".

IIRS can split reflected sunlight and disperses it into different spectral bands between 800 nanometer to 5000 nanometer, using a grating system.

Earlier, on October 4, ISRO had released a few snaps of the southern polar area of the Moon captured by the Orbiter High-Resolution Camera (OHRC) that are on-board Chandrayaan-2, of the