ISRO loses radio contact with Chandrayaan-1

Bangalore: ISRO officials feel that India's Chandrayaan-1 may finally be over with the agency's deep space network at Byalalu losing contact with the lunar orbiter early today.

"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.

It said space scientists were reviewing telemetry data to analyse the health of the spacecraft's sub-systems.

Chandrayaan was launched 22 October 2008 from India's spaceport Sriharikota on board a 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.

Earlier, a star sensor had stopped functioning necessitating some improvisations on the part of the agency to keep the orbiter functioning, It had then said that the orbiter had already performed 95 per cent of mission objectives and hoped to complete the remaining in a short time.

It had its orbit raised from 100km above the lunar surface to 200km in a bid to avoid thermal heat, which had earlier knocked out a number of sensors onboard. The impact of thermal heating on its systems was one of the lessons the agency learned from the Chandrayaaan-1 experiment.