Contact lost, India terminates first moon mission

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Contact between India's only satellite orbiting the moon and its monitoring station was suddenly lost on Saturday. The country's space agency said the station was no longer receiving data from the spacecraft.

G. Madhavam Nair, Chairman of India Space Research Organization, said, "At the moment, the mission is suspended because we do not have any radio contact with the satellite. This event happened in the early morning hours, and of course, just before that we had a good pass over Byalalu, and that has given a lot of data. From there, we are trying to see whether there is any clue as to whether any mishap in any of the instruments on board, so we are still analyzing that."

The launch of Chandrayaan-1 in October 2008 put India in an elite club of countries with moon missions. By the time it disappeared, the spacecraft had completed 312 days in orbit, and orbited the moon more than 3,400 times. A space agency spokesman said that in spite of the current communication failure, the satellite's mission has been highly successful. It has monitored a solar eclipse and conducted a radar experiment.