India loses contact with a spaceship on mission on the moon

BENGALURU / MUMBAI (Reuters) – India lost contact with a spacecraft it was trying to land on the moon on Saturday, its space agency said in a failure for the country's ambitious plan to become the first country in the world. sound the lunar south pole still unexplored.

The landing of the Chandrayaan-2 lunar mission was attempting a "soft" or controlled landing near the South Pole of the Moon, where scientists believe that there could be ice-water. Communication was lost by the time she was about to land.

"The data is being analyzed," K Sivan, chairman of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), told scientists in distress at the agency's monitoring center in Bengaluru.

The Indian probe, which gravitated around the moon, began descending towards the lunar surface around 2007 GMT, but the scientists lost contact with it during the penultimate stage of the descent.

For a graph of the planned landing sequence of the spacecraft, click here.

A live broadcast from ISRO, the equivalent of NASA in India, showed the scientists that the situation was tense and the ground was silent while the control station was struggling to get a signal from the undercarriage.

"There are ups and downs in life … What you have accomplished is no small feat," said Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who was present at the ISRO center, to scientists after to have been informed by Sivan.

ISRO made no further comment, but Modi hinted in an address to the nation that the LG could have traveled at a higher speed than expected and crashed onto the moon.

"If historians once wrote about today's incident, they would certainly say that, inspired by our romantic description of the moon throughout life, Chandrayaan, in the last stage of his trip, rushed to kiss the moon, "he said.

"I can say with pride that the effort was worth it, as well as the trip," added Modi.

In a moment of emotion broadcast on television channels, Modi kissed and comforted a visibly torn Sivan.

"We are convinced that the best is yet to come in terms of our space program," said Modi.

"15 minutes of terror"

Sivan had previously described the final moments of the landing mission as "15 minutes of terror," because of the complexities inherent in lunar gravity, terrain, and dust.

For a chart of the second Indian lunar mission, click here.

Only the United States, Russia and China have landed on the moon. Beijing's Chang'e-4 spacecraft landed on the far side this year, as Israel tried unsuccessfully to land its Beresheet plane on the moon in April.

The South Pole is believed to contain water because the craters of the area are largely unaffected by the high temperatures of the sun. ISRO had hoped to confirm the presence of water in the form of ice, detected for the first time during its mission in 2008.

Experts said the LG and Rover were only part of the lunar mission and the Chandrayaan-2 orbiter was still in orbit around the moon and would collect and return valuable data for a year.

Mukund Rao, managing director of the Center for Spatial Analytics and Advanced GIS, said the moon planning could be flawed.

"They have to go back to the drawing board and try it again," said Rao, an ISRO senior scientist for 24 years, who then joined private and non-governmental space projects.

He said the scientists needed a deeper understanding of aspects such as braking and thrust mechanisms, as well as the ground of the moon. It was important to analyze the data and find out what had happened, Rao said.

India has new ambitions in the space.

Last year, Modi announced a 100 billion rupee project, called "Gaganyaan", to send a three-member crew to a low Earth orbit by 2022.

For a chart of potential Chandrayaan – 2 landing sites, click here.

For a graphic on the successful lunar landing sites successful, click here