ALL the cameras on China's first lunar probe will be activated later this month and are expected to photograph every inch of the moon surface by mid January next year, a spokesman for the National Space Administration said today.

The statements by Li Guoping, the administration's spokesman, came after Chang'e 1 underwent final adjustments at the end of a two-week journey and entered a final working orbit at 8:34am today, where it is supposed to stay 200 km above the moon's surface to carry out scientific explorations for a year.

"The satellite will first make some orbit corrections and it will also carry out tests on the equipment," Li told at a news conference in Beijing this afternoon.

The satellite, named after a mythical Chinese goddess who flew to the moon, will open its three cameras and transmit its first photo back to China late this month after scientists finish an appraisal and analysis of the working status of the craft.

The orbiter's CCD Stereo Camera will cover the moon surface in less than a month while the microwave detector can do it twice during the same period, Li added. Besides, it will take its gamma/x-ray spectrometer two months to analyze the moon.

The orbiter is expected to analyze the chemical and mineral composition of the lunar surface and send data back to the Earth so that scientists can draw the country's first moon picture, Li noted.

The satellite is equipped with a stereo camera and interferometer, an imager and gamma/x-ray spectrometer, a laser altimeter, a microwave detector, a high-energy solar particle detector and a low-energy ion detector.

But as the image resolution of the camera used on Chang'e 1, or on any former or future satellites, is not good enough to reach centimeters, Chang'e 1 will not be able to take pictures of the footprint left on the moon by US astronauts, Sun Huixian, deputy chief designer of the moon probe, said at the conference.

So far, the satellite has experienced four orbital transfers, one orbital correction and three braking maneuvers.

Meanwhile, Li denied a newspaper report that the country plans to launch a space station by 2020 today as "China will first be fully concentrated on the follow-up work of the manned space shuttle and moon probe projects."

China Daily reported today that China was planning to build "a small-scale, 20-ton space workshop by 2020."

The 2,350-kg satellite blasted off on a Long March 3A carrier rocket on October 24 from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in Sichuan Province, marking the first step of China's ambitious 10-year moon plan, which will lead to a moon landing and launch of a moon rover at around 2012.

In the third phase, another rover will land on the moon and return to earth with lunar soil and stone samples for scientific research at around 2017.

In 2003, China became only the third country in the world after the United States and Russia to send a human into orbit.