Chandrayaan - 1
India’s first ambitious lunar mission Chandrayaan-1 lost its contact with ISRO on Saturday August 29, 2009 after ten months of its launch. According to ISRO officials this mission is over now, and it has completed 90-95% of the technical work, it was intended to do.
Chandrayaan 1: Launch and Achievements
Chandrayaan 1 was launched on October 22, 2008 from Satish Dhawan Space Centre at Sriharikota by PSLV-C11. It completed 312 days in orbit and making 3400 orbits around the moon. It was equipped with sophisticated sensors such as terrain mapping camera, hyper-spectral imager and moon mineralogy mapper, meeting most of the scientific objectives of the mission.
Chandrayaan 1 sent nearly 70,000 amazing images of surface of moon which includes mountains and craters especially at moon’s polar region. It also collected critical information about chemical and mineral content of moon.
Madhavan Nair, the ISRO chief admitted that Mission Chandrayaan has come to an end, although it is a difficult situation.
He says:
“At the moment, we have suspended the mission. Calling it off would depend on what has failed. We are trying to analyze what has gone wrong and we will take a look at it tomorrow.”Problems with Chandrayaan 1:
Scientists are still analyzing the reasons of this unexpected problem that came with Chandrayaan, but it may be caused due to the malfunctioning of star sensor that determines the orientation of spacecraft. This sensor started created problems four month back before this mission ended. Also one of the bus management units failed. There was also an overheating problem necessitating the deactivation of some of the 11 payloads.
