Sudden death for Indian moon mission

Communication link with Chandrayaan-1 broke on Saturday

India’s moon mission, Chandrayaan-1, came to an abrupt end today after communication link with the spacecraft snapped. The spacecraft, which has 11 instruments on board including six from overseas, will now continue to orbit the moon and may eventually taste the lunar dust. Launched on October 22 last year, it was expected to orbit the moon for two years.

“We lost communication link with the spacecraft for the first time in the wee hours of Saturday. Attempts to re-establish contact have been futile. The mission is as good as lost,” Indian Space Research Organisation Director S Satish said. “We may have to abandon the spacecraft if we are not able to establish radio contact with it again,” he added. “The mission is definitely over. We have lost contact with the spacecraft,” Chandrayaan-1 Project Director M Annadurai told Press Trust of India.

 

The problem surfaced at 0130 hrs when ISRO suddenly lost radio contact with the spacecraft. Since then it has neither been able to receive nor send any data to the spacecraft. The Deep Space Network at Byalalu near Bangalore received data from Chandrayaan-1 up to 0025 hrs. A detailed review of the telemetry data received from the spacecraft is in progress and health of the spacecraft subsystems is being analysed, said a statement from ISRO.

The Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft was launched from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre at Sriharikota. The project cost was around Rs 390 crore. The 1,380 kg spacecraft has completed 312 days in space and has made over 3,400 orbits around the moon. It has provided large volume of data from sophisticated sensors, and has met most of the scientific objectives of the mission.

ISRO had said last month that Chandrayaan-1 had sent more than 70,000 images of the lunar surface which provide breathtaking views of lunar mountains and craters, especially craters in the permanently shadowed areas of the moon’s polar region. It was also collecting valuable data pertaining to the chemical and mineral content of earth’s satellite. “It ( Chandrayaan-1) has done its job technically...100 per cent. Scientifically also, it has done 90-95 percent of its job,” PTI quoted Annadurai as saying.

However, in July, Chandrayaan-1 had developed a malfunction that put some experiments in jeopardy – it had lost a vital sensor. ISRO Chairman G Madhavan Nair had said that scientists had worked around the problem and patched two other instruments to help the spacecraft to the desired locations.

It was then that he had indicated that the life of Chandrayaan-1 may be reduced.

Still, on August 21, ISRO and NASA performed a unique joint experiment that the Indian space agency said could yield additional information on the possible existence of ice in a permanently shadowed crater near the North pole of the moon.

The idea of undertaking an Indian scientific mission to Moon was first mooted in a meeting of the Indian Academy of Sciences in 1999 that was followed up by discussions in the Astronautical Society of India in 2000.

But it was only in November 2003 that the government approved ISRO’s proposal for the first Indian Moon Mission called Chandrayaan-1.

The government had also announced its plans to launch Chandrayaan-2, the second unmanned lunar exploration mission proposed by ISRO, at a cost of around Rs 450 crore.

The mission will include a lunar orbiter as well as a lander/rover.

However, the abrupt end of Chandrayyan-1 may now raise doubts about its proposed launch in 2012.