BANGALORE: India’s first moon mission came to an abrupt end Saturday after controllers lost contact with the country’s lunar craft, the national space agency said. India launched an unmanned satellite and put a probe on the moon’s surface late last year in an event that the national space agency hoped would give the country international “brand recognition” in the lunar business.
The landing of the probe vaulted the country into the league of space-faring nations led by the United States and regional neighbors Russia, China and Japan and was seen as a symbolic and proud moment in the country’s development.
“The mission is definitely over. We have lost contact with the spacecraft,” project director M. Annadurai told the PTI news agency.
Earlier, the state-run Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) had said in a statement that radio contact with the Chandrayaan-1 satellite had been lost at 1.30 a.m. local time (2000 GMT Friday).
The satellite was launched Oct. 22 and then fired a TV-set-sized probe painted in the green, white and orange colors of the Indian flag that landed on the moon on Nov. 14.
The first mission was expected to last two years and was intended as a first step toward landing an unmanned moon rover by 2012. The ISRO also aims to launch satellites to study Mars and Venus.
The director of the ISRO, S. Satish, told AFP that all attempts to re-establish contact with the satellite had been futile.
“We are unable to send commands or receive data,” he said, adding that there was no method to restore the failed communication systems.
“It will continue to orbit around the moon. If not controlled, it may crash after sometime on the lunar surface,” he acknowledged.
The craft suffered a setback earlier this year when one of its sensors was burned due to solar radiation. As a result, it had to suspend some scientific experiments and raised its lunar orbit to 200 km instead of the original 100 km.
The last data received at the Deep Space Network control center, 40 km from India’s tech hub Bangalore, was during an orbit at 00:25 a.m. local time. The first space mission cost India $80 million, less than half the amount spent on similar expeditions by other countries. One of the mission’s main aims was to look for Helium 3, an isotope which is very rare on Earth but could be an energy source in the future in nuclear fusion. India has developed its own satellites and launch vehicles to cut dependence on overseas agencies.
It first staked its claim for a share of the global commercial launch market by sending an Italian satellite into orbit in 2007. In January last year, it launched an Israeli spy satellite.
