India's first moon mission, launched amid much fanfare last year, came to an abrupt end Saturday after the country's lunar craft lost contact with its controllers, the national space agency said. Radio contacts with Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft were abruptly lost at 0130 Saturday (2000 GMT Friday), the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) said. “The mission is definitely over. We have lost contact with the spacecraft,” project director M. Annadurai told the PTI news agency. The launch of Chandrayaan-1 in Oct. 2008 had put India in an elite club of countries with moon missions. Other countries with similar satellites are the United States, Russia, the European Space Agency, Japan and China. Chandrayaan-1 has completed 312 days in orbit and orbited the moon more than 3,400 times, or around 95 percent of the two-year mission's objectives, ISR0 spokesman S. Satish told the Associated Press. “We are studying the telemetry data and trying to figure out what is the problem.” He said ISRO had received a large volume of data from the spacecraft – which is slotted in an automatic orbit of the moon. The satellite was launched Oct. 22, 2008. It then fired a TV-set-sized probe painted in the green, white and orange colours of the Indian flag, which landed on the moon on Nov. 14, 2008.
