By IANS,
Bangalore : Radio contact with India’s first lunarcraft Chandrayaan-1 was abruptly lost early Saturday, the Indian space agency said.
“The contact was lost at 01.30 IST as the deep space network (DSN) at Byalalu, about 40 km from Bangalore, received the data from the lunarcraft during the previous orbit up to 00.25 IST,” according to an Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) statement here.
The space scientists are reviewing the telemetry data to analyse the health of the spacecraft’s sub-systems.
Chandrayaan was launched Oct 22, 2008 from India’s only spaceport Sriharikota, about 90 km from northeast of Chennai, on board the polar satellite launch vehicle (PSLV).
“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 added.