Chang'e 1 returns its first image from the Moon

On Monday, with much pomp and circumstance (and rightfully so), Chinese premier Wen Jiabao unveiled the first image returned from the Moon by the Chang'e 1 orbiter, China's first spacecraft to depart Earth orbit. That's something only Russia, the United States, ESA, and Japan have managed to do before.

It's very nice-looking, but how does it compare to what we have from other missions? The 120-meter resolution is comparable to the best obtained by Clementine, and also comparable to the global map that will be obtained by Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. It's lower-resolution than SMART-1's AMIE, and also lower than most of the cameras on Kaguya. (Which reminds me, I also have some very nice images from Kaguya's terrain camera to post -- later.) Generally speaking, you trade resolution for coverage -- meaning that if your spacecraft takes higher resolution photos, it's less likely to cover the whole planet. The resolution of this camera is a comfortable one for building a global map; Chang'e 1 should do that in stereo, creating an atlas that not only shows the landforms but also shows their topography.

You can check out some of the Lunar Orbiter photos of the same general area here and here (that's how I hunted down the names of the craters). And here's the Google Moon view of the same area, which uses the Clementine atlas as a base map. As you can see, the Clementine images are quite comparable to this one.