CHINA'S first lunar probe Chang'e 1 completed its second braking maneuver this morning, the Beijing Aerospace Control Center announced.

The center issued the braking command at 11:21am as Chang'e 1 roamed to the perilune – the point on an elliptical lunar orbit that is nearest to the moon -- and it decelerated and entered a 3.5-hour orbit about 15 minutes later.

The perilune of the orbit is 200 kilometers away from the moon surface while its apolune—the farthest point from the center of the moon -- is 1,700 km from the surface.

The craft, named after a mythical Chinese goddess who flew to the moon, slowed its speed from 1.948km a second to 1.8 km a second when it entered the orbit. It is expected to slow down for the third time at 8:09am tomorrow to enter a 127-minute orbit, where it is due to start its formal work.

The satellite will then stay for a year in the round orbit, 200km from the moon's surface, for scientific exploration.

The orbiter carried out its first braking maneuver at 11:15am yesterday when it was about 300km from the moon, decreasing its speed from the previous 2.4km a second to about 1.9km to 2.0km a second.

Twenty-two minutes later, the craft entered a 12-hour elliptical lunar orbit, making it the country's first moon satellite — "a milestone in China's aerospace history," as the Commission of Science Technology and Industry for National Defense has said.

The probe blasted off on a Long March 3A carrier rocket on October 24 from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in Sichuan Province.

It is scheduled to relay the first picture of the moon later this month, and will continue to explore the moon for a year.

The 2,350-kilogram 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.

It will fulfill four scientific objectives including a three-dimensional survey of the moon's surface.