Panaji, August 31: India on Sunday decided to terminate its first unmanned moon mission as contact could not be re-established with the spacecraft Chandrayaan, a top space official said here.
“We are disappointed with what has happened, but we have managed to salvage a large volume of data,” Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) chairman G. Madhavan Nair told reporters here.
“We are content with the result,” he said. Earlier, Indian scientists tried to restore radio contact with the lunarcraft Chandrayaan-1.
“Efforts are still on to restore the signal with the mooncraft though chances are slim. If we fail to establish the link again, we may call off the mission much earlier than the two-year schedule,” ISRO director S. Satish had earlier specified.
A team of scientists and technicians had been working since early Saturday to re-establish radio contact with the 514-kg lunarcraft from the space agency’s telemetry, tracking and command network (Istrac) at Peenya on the outskirts of the city.
DSN first lost radio contact with Chandrayaan at 1.30am on Saturday when it was over north America.
The $80-million (Rs380-crore) Chandrayaan was launched amid much fanfare on October 22, 2008 from ISRO’s spaceport Sriharikota, about 90 km from northeast of Chennai, on board the 316-tonne polar satellite launch vehicle (PSLV-CII), with 11 scientific payloads, including the moon impact probe that was crash-landed on the lunar surface on November 14.
During its 10-month rendezvous with the earth’s only natural satellite, the lunarcraft completed 3,400 orbits in 312 days and transmitted volumes of data from sophisticated scientific instruments such as terrain mapping camera, hyper-spectral imager and moon mineralogy mapper.
Chandrayaan’s high-resolution cameras relayed over 70,000 digital images of the lunar surface, providing breathtaking views of mountains and craters, including those in the permanently shadowed area of the moon’s polar region.
–Agencies