Former President Dr A P J Abdul Kalam, who holds the moon mission close to his heart, on Saturday expressed happiness over the first photographs of Earth taken by the terrain mapping camera on board Chandrayaan-1.

Kalam, who has been closely associated with the country's space programmes, said that he had seen the first pictures of the Earth, shown to him by ISRO chief Madhavan Nair.

"They are good pictures. They are high-resolution pictures," he said on the sidelines of a function organised to mark the launch of an emergency response service in Karnataka.

The photographs, he said, "are indicative of what things hold for us in future."

On the moon mission, he said, "Every Indian should be proud about the success of the mission."

The terrain mapping camera on board India's first unmanned lunar spacecraft Chandrayaan took black and white shots of the Earth from deep space. The camera was operated through a series of commands from the spacecraft control center of ISRO's telemetry tracking and command network.