THE CHANDRAYAN I mission is over and India's honeymoon in lunar space came to an abrupt end. The actual lifetime of Chandrayaan 1 is 2 years but everything came to end in just 312 days.The country’s space agency has lost radio contact with the lunar craft Chandrayaan-1 at around 1:30 AM on August 29th.Data from Chandrayaan-1’s last orbit was transmitted until 12.25am on Saturday to the Indian Deep Space Network at Byalalu near Bangalore.With communication totally lost, there is no transmission or receipt of signals between Chandrayaan-I and ground control stations.
Nearly 95% of Chandrayaan’s scientific goals had already been accomplished in less than a year. At Rs 386 crore, the mission that put India in the global space league of six nations, was launched on October 22. Chandrayaan-I aimed to take high-resolution, three-dimensional images of the lunar surface, especially the permanently-shadowed polar regions.The craft carried payloads from the United States, the European Union and Bulgaria. One of its objectives was to search for evidence of water or ice and attempt to identify the chemical composition of certain lunar rocks.
Chandrayaan-1’s temperature raised to over 50 degrees Celsius, prompted ISRO to switch off most of the 11 instruments it was carrying. The ‘star’ sensor, unable to bear the heat, collapsed.Though there was no official word on the cause of the loss of contact, space experts, said it could be due to a power problem in the spacecraft, or the spacecraft being hit by a some space object. Earlier this year, the Indian government increased the federal budget for space research to about $1 billion from $700 million.
