Aug. 29: Indian Space Research Organisation chairman Gopalan Madhavan Nair was woken up by his colleagues at 2 am on Saturday. They had devastating news. India's first mooncraft, Chandrayaan-I, was lost.
The spacecraft's radio contact with mission command at Deep Space Network (DSN) at Byalalu, 40 km from Bengaluru, was severed at 1.30 am and efforts to restore the link remained futile. Dr Nair's colleagues plan to make another attempt to re-establish communication later on Saturday night. A sense of despair, however, has already set in among space scientists because they are convinced that Chandrayaan-I has come to an untimely end. "We have no clue yet. It is very difficult to predict the chances of recovering the spacecraft," Dr Nair told this newspaper.
His colleague, Chandrayaan project director M. Annadurai, however, was up-front: "The mission is over. We spent the entire night trying to retrieve the spacecraft, but gave up this morning. Chandrayaan-I has done its job during its 312-day orbit. Just now, we are putting together the data of the last hour-and-a-half before the snag. Perhaps we will talk about the cause (of the snag) in a day or two," he said.
Playing down the setback to the Indian space programme, Dr Nair said Chandrayaan ought not to be described as a flop because it had achieved almost all its scientific and technical objectives. "From the launch (on October 22, 2008) to reaching its precise orbit (100 km around the moon, about 3,84,000 km from the earth), to landing the MIP (moon impact probe), to gathering data, we have crossed all the milestones," he said.
Saturday's setback occurred on the eve of a conference scheduled in Bengaluru for September 7 to analyse scientific data beamed home from the earth's nearest astral neighbour. All participating teams, including from Nasa and the European Space Agency, will examine the data and come forward with details of the composition of lunar soil.
The end came a week after an experiment - the first ever by space-faring nations - to manoeuvre their orbiters over their spot on the moon to scout for water-ice. Chandrayaan-I had been moved closer to Nasa's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. The results of this experiment will be disclosed during the conference here next month. Saturday's snag proved fatal for the spacecraft. Scientists had managed to overcome an earlier one, in May 2009, when a couple of star sensors stopped functioning.
The spacecraft was then moved to a new orbit (200 km) to continue its scrutiny of the lunar surface.
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