Bangalore, August 29
India’s maiden moon mission Chandrayaan-I came to a premature end today with the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) announcing that it had lost radio contact with the unmanned spacecraft.
An ISRO press release issued here this afternoon said, “The radio contact with Chandrayaan-I was abruptly lost at 0130 hrs (IST) today. Deep Space Network at Byalalu near Bangalore received data from Chandrayaan-I during the previous orbit up to 0025 hrs (IST).”
“The mission is over. We have lost contact with the spacecraft,” project director of Chandrayaan-1 mission M Annadurai, said.
Losing radio contact with the spacecraft meant that ISRO was no more able to send commands to the spacecraft to control it. The spacecraft was earlier put in an orbit 200 km above the lunar surface. It is now lost in the deep space. “How can we know about the location of the spacecraft in the absence of radio communication?” an ISRO official said.
He said the scientists were studying the data last received from the spacecraft and were trying to find out “what went wrong”.
The press release issued by the ISRO said, “A detailed review of the telemetry data received from the spacecraft is in progress and health of the spacecraft subsystems is being analysed.”
Chandrayaan-I lost its star sensors used for giving orientation to the spacecraft in April. ISRO activated the gyroscopes aboard the spacecraft, kept as a back-up in the eventuality of failure of the star sensors, and the redundancy mechanism worked.
On August 21, Chandrayaan-I flew in tandem with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) of NASA and performed a joint experiment to determine the presence of water in a permanently shadowed crater on the lunar north
pole.
The Indian mission encountered another major problem in the recent past when it lost its control redundancy. Losing it meant that in case of failure of the existing control, the spacecraft no more had a back-up system to control it from the ground and it would be lost in the space for ever.
The present problem regarding the ground segment losing radio communication with the spacecraft is said to have stemmed from snags developing in the spacecraft’s control system.
The mission, which cost about Rs 386 crore, was originally slated for a life of two years. It completed 312 days in the orbit before coming to an abrupt end.
The mission, however, has attained most of its objectives, including dropping the Moon Impact Probe carrying the Indian flag on the lunar surface and collecting valuable data to determine the presence of water on the moon.
“The spacecraft completed 312 days in the orbit making more than 3,400 revolutions around the Moon and providing a large volume of data from sophisticated sensors like terrain-mapping camera, hyper-spectral imager, moon mineralogy mapper etc., meeting most of the scientific objectives of the mission,” the ISRO press release said.
Pleased with the performance of Chandrayaan-I, the government has already approved the launch of Chandrayaan-II, which is expected to take off between 2010 and 2012, and will include a rover that will land on the moon.
India plans to send an astronaut into the space by 2014 and a manned mission to the moon by 2020.
