Chandrayaan-1: ISRO loses contact, claims mission 'over'

BANGALORE: Ten months after it waslaunched, India's maiden moon mission the ambitious Chandrayaan-1 came to anabrupt end on Saturday after ISRO lost communication with the spacecraft,cutting short the dream odyssey that was expected to last two years."The mission is definitely over. We have lost contact with thespacecraft," Project Director of the Chandrayaan-1 mission M Annadurai said.However, he said: "It (Chandrayaan-1) has done its jobtechnically...100 per cent. Scientifically also, it has done almost 90-95percent of its job". ISRO chief Madhavan Nair on Saturday virtuallyadmitted that the Chandrayaan-I moon mission could be over, saying it is a"pretty difficult" situation. "At the moment, we have suspended themission. Calling it off would depend on what has failed. We are trying toanalyse what has gone wrong and we will take a look at it tomorrow," he toldreporters. Asked if there was any hope of the mission surviving, hesaid he can't confirm anything at the moment. The two-year mission,launched on October 22 last year with much fanfare, was abandoned early todayafter the after radio contact with the mooncraft was abruptly lost at 0130hours. The Deep Space Network at Byalalu near here received the datafrom the 1,380 kg Chandrayaan-1, which carried 11 instruments on board,including six from overseas, during the previous orbit up to 0025 hours.ISRO is conducting detailed review of the telemetry data from thespacecraft. "We will analyse as to what happened," Annaduraisaid.Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, launched by homegrown PSLV-C11 fromSatish Dhawan Space Centre at Sriharikota, has completed 312 days in orbit,making more than 3,400 orbits around the moon. It has provided largevolume of data from sophisticated sensors such as terrain mapping camera,hyper-spectral imager and moon mineralogy mapper, meeting most of the scientificobjectives of the mission. ISRO said last month Chandrayaan-1 hadsent more than 70,000 images of the lunar surface which provide breathtakingviews of lunar mountains and craters, especially craters in the permanentlyshadowed areas of the Moon's polar region. Chandrayaan-1 was alsocollecting valuable data pertaining to the chemical and mineral content of theMoon, ISRO said on July 17. Significantly, on August 21, ISRO andNASA performed a unique joint experiment that the Indian space agency said couldyield additional information on the possibility of existence of ice in apermanently shadowed crater near the North Pole of the moon. The endto the Chandrayaan-1 mission comes just over four months after the onboard starsensor for determining the orientation of the spacecraft started malfunctioningon April 26, and one of the bus management units failed.QnA: Is the end of Chandrayaan-1 a failure and a setback for ISRO?QnA: Does ISRO have the caliber to overshadow NASA?