India loses Moon satellite links
Posted on August 29, 2009
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India’s first moon mission, launched amid much fanfare last year, came to an abrupt end Saturday after the country’s lunar craft lost contact with its controllers, the national space agency said. All communication links with the only Indian satellite orbiting the Moon have been lost, India’s space agency says. Radio contact with the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft was lost abruptly early on Saturday, said India’s Bangalore-based Space Research Organization (Isro). ”The contact was lost at 1:30 am IST (Indian Standard Time) (2000 GMT Friday) as the deep space network (DSN) at Byalalu, about 40 km from Bangalore, received the data from the lunar craft during the previous orbit up to 00:25 am IST,” said ISRO in a statement issued at its headquarters in Bangalore, southern India. ”The spacecraft has completed 312 days in orbit, making over 3,400 orbits around the moon and providing large volume of data from sophisticated sensors like terrain mapping camera, hyper-spectral imager, moon mineralogy mapper and so on, meeting most of the scientific objectives of the mission,” the statement said. It said space scientists are reviewing the telemetry data to analyze the health of the spacecraft’s sub-systems. Chandrayaan I was launched on Oct. 22, 2008 from Sriharikota space center, 90 km from Chennai, southern India, on board the polar satellite launch vehicle (PSLV).
The unmanned craft was launched last October in what was billed as a two-year mission of exploration. The launch was regarded as a major step for India as it seeks to keep pace with other space-faring nations in Asia. Following its launch from the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, it was hoped the robotic probe would orbit the Moon, compile a 3-D atlas of the lunar surface and map the distribution of elements and minerals. Last month the satellite experienced a technical problem when a sensor malfunctioned. Powered by a single solar panel generating about 700 watts, the Isro probe carries five Indian-built instruments and six constructed in other countries, including the US, Britain and Germany. The mission was expected to cost 3.8bn rupees (£45m; $78m), considerably less than Japanese and Chinese probes sent to the Moon last year. But the Indian government’s space efforts have not been welcomed by all. Some critics regard the space programme as a waste of resources in a country where millions still lack basic services.
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