India’s only satellite orbiting the moon came close to overheating and failure but scientists improvised to save it, officials said Friday
The launch of Chandrayaan-1 last fall put India in an elite group to have lunar missions along with the U.S., Russia, the European Space Agency, Japan and China.
Chandrayaan-I, launched in October last with a two-year life span, has lost a major sensor and may meet a premature end, ISRO said today. “Unfortunately, during the last month we have lost a vital sensor — the star sensor,” ISRO Chief G Madhavan Nair said.
“Like in the olden days when one used to look at the stars to fix a direction, likewise an onboard electronic equipment was doing all this and it was required for precise pointing (towards the moon). With its loss we are really worried,” he said.
“But to the credit of the ISRO scientific team, they have worked out a very innovative way of overcoming the problem,” the ISRO chief said, but added that if some more failures happen, “then we will have problems”. Nair, however, said that in the last eight months of the operation of the mission, “we have collected almost all the data that we wanted” and that most of its objectives have already been completed.
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