India’s space agency reports an end to an $82 million mission to map the surface of the moon after failing to restore contact with its unmanned Chandrayaan I craft. Contact was lost with the probe two days ago and scientists at the Indian Space Research Organisation were unable to restore communications, said S.K. Shivkumar, the director of the ISRO’s Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network. The craft began orbiting the moon last November.
“The mission has been terminated,” Shivkumar said by telephone from Bangalore, adding computers on the craft failed. Chandrayaan I, or “Moon Craft,” was launched on October 22 last year to map the lunar terrain as a first step toward landing an unmanned rover there by 2012. The moon is again the focus of international exploration 40 years after American Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on its surface, with the U.S., China, South Korea and Russia planning manned or unmanned missions in coming years.
“We survived for 315 days which is a good record. Many such experiments have burnt within a month in the past,” state- run broadcaster Doordarshan cited ISRO chief Madhavan Nair as saying yesterday. “We are disappointed with the development, but have managed to get a large volume of data,” including 70,000 images of the moon, Nair told reporters.
The next step in the lunar mission, the Chandrayaan II, which aims to land an unmanned rover on the moon’s surface to prospect for chemicals, won’t be delayed, Doordarshan cited Nair as saying. India will launch a mission to Mars within four to six years, Nair told reporters today, according to the Press Trust of India.
The fact that India could launch the craft, place it in orbit and receive data at its ground stations was a “phenomenal success,” said B.N. Raghunandan, a professor at the Indian Institute of Science’s Department of Aerospace Engineering.
The termination of the mission isn’t a setback for the country’s space program, “though it is sad,” he said. The craft was designed to orbit the moon for two years at an altitude of 100 kilometers (62 miles). It will take 1,000 days to hit the lunar surface and is being tracked by the U.S. and Russia, according to Doordarshan.
The Chandrayaan I is carrying 11 payloads, including a terrain-mapping camera developed by India designed to prepare a three-dimensional atlas of the moon. It is also carrying mapping instruments for the European Space Agency, radiation-measuring equipment for the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and two devices for NASA to assess mineral composition and look for ice deposits. India launched its first rocket in 1963 and first satellite in 1975. The country’s satellite program is one of the largest communication systems in the world.
Japan launched its first lunar explorer, Kaguya, in September 2007 and landed a probe on the moon’s surface in June this year. China is scheduled to land a rover to retrieve soil and rock samples in 2012 and, like the U.S., plans to send astronauts there by 2020. Russia aims to follow with a manned mission five years later.
South Korea intends to send a probe to orbit the moon by 2020, according to the Korea Aerospace Research Institute. The nation carried out its first space rocket launch last week in an unsuccessful attempt to put a satellite into orbit. The satellite probably burned up in the atmosphere after falling back to Earth, according to the government.
Written by: Ed Johnson in Sydney and Jay Shankar in Bangalore at Bloomberg.com. You can find this article India Ends Lunar Mission After Losing Probe Signal (Update2) at.
