Chandrayaan-1 mission comes to an abrupt end

Today's headlines have some bad news of the Indian Moon mission. The Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft has lost contact with its controllers earlier yesterday. Soon after, ISRO announced that the mission was over.

The ISRO press release says

Radio contact with Chandrayaan-I spacecraft was abruptly lost at 0130 Hrs (IST) on August 29, 2009. Deep Space Network at Byalalu near Bangalore received the data from Chandrayaan-I during the previous orbit upto 0025 Hrs (IST).

Detailed review of the Telemetry data received from the spacecraft is in progress and health of the spacecraft subsystems is being analysed.

It may be recalled that Chandrayaan-I spacecraft was launched from Satish Dhawan Space Centre Sriharikota on October 22, 2008 .The Spacecraft has completed 312 days in orbit making more than 3400 orbits around the Moon and providing 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.

Chandrayaan-1 launched on October 22 last year was expected to last for 2 years. Nevertheless, according to the project director, Chandrayaan-1 "has done its job technically 100% and scientifically almost 90-95%" in its less than one year lifetime.

Experts said, the reason behind this loss of contact could be a power problem on the spacecraft, or may be it was hit by some space object.