India declared on Saturday that its first unmanned mission to the moon had ended after the national space agency lost contact with its lunar craft orbiting the moon.
“The radio contact with Chandrayaan-1 was abruptly lost at 1:30am Indian Standard Time by the Deep Space Network [DSN],” the government-run Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) said in a statement.
The probe, which had been expected to last two years, came to an end 10 months after the launch but had met most of the objectives of the mission, ISRO scientists said.
Shortly after the statement, Chandrayaan-1 project director M Annadurai announced the end of the mission, the PTI news agency reported.
“The mission is definitely over. We have lost contact with the spacecraft,” Annadurai told the PTI.
“It [Chandrayaan-1] has done its job technically ... 100 percent. Scientifically also, it has done almost 90 to 95 percent of its job,” he said.
News channels quoting ISRO sources said “connectivity revival” was rare and the Chandrayaan-1 was likely to crash into the moon.
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