Having lost communications with its first lunar orbiting satellite, the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) has declared the mission of the Chandrayaan-I to be at an end. Though the Chandrayaan-I was lost just prior to a year in a planned two year mission, scientists at the ISRO have declared that ninety five percent of the probes objectives have been met.
During its mission, Chandrayaan-I, according to New Kerala “completed 3,400 orbits in 312 days and transmitted volumes of data from sophisticated scientific instruments such as terrain mapping camera, hyper-spectral imager and moon mineralogy mapper.” Chandrayaan-I also took 70,000 digital images of the lunar surface.
Most recently, in a joint operation with the American Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, Chandrayaan-I bounced radar off of permanently shadowed craters at the lunar North Pole in search of water ice. Both the Chandrayaan-I and the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter analyzed the returned echoes.
Chandrayaan-I was one of a number of lunar orbiting space craft that included not only the aforementioned American Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, but also spacecraft from Japan, China, and the European Union. These probes are part of programs of lunar exploration by various countries in anticipation of a manned return to the Moon, currently scheduled in ten years. Plans to return human astronauts to the Moon have been placed in some doubt due to options being discussed by the Augustine Committee, some of which may preclude human exploration of the lunar surface any time soon.
In the meantime, India is planning an unmanned lunar rover, probes to Mars and Venus, and a possible manned space mission sometime in the next decade.
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