Chandrayan-I beyond Indian radio contact

Bangalore, Aug 29: India lost contact with Chandrayan-I, its first lunarcraft on Saturday, Aug 29, reported ISRO.

"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.

The telemetry data is being reviewed to gauge the health of the spacecraft's sub-systems.

Chandrayaan, launched Oct 22, 2008 from India's only spaceport Sriharikota is 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.

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