Chandrayaan-2: Countdown begins... last hope for ISRO

New Delhi: The Indian Space Research Organisation is racing against time as it has to establish contact with the Vikram lander before September 21 because after that the moon region would enter into a lunar night. Once the region enters into a lunar night, it would make it impossible for the lander to get any sunlight to generate power for its working.

Chandrayaan-2’s Vikram lander lost contact with the ground station on September 7 and since then the space agency is attempting to establish contact.

An ISRO official said, “Progressively, you can imagine that it becomes that much more difficult, with each passing hour, the available power on the battery gets drained out, and there won't be anything left for it to power and operate.”

Vikram lander, with rover Pragyan housed inside it, had lost communication with ground station on September 7 during its final descent, just 2.1 kilometre above the lunar surface.

The space agency said a national-level committee comprising academics and ISRO experts are analysing the cause of communication loss with Chandrayaan 2 lander.

On Thursday, NASA confirmed that its Moon orbiter captured images of the lunar region where Vikram made an unsuccessful attempt to soft-land. The images were captured by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft during its flyby on September 17, the US space agency said.

India had expected to make space history with Chandrayaan 2 mission. A successful soft landing on the moon's surface would have made the country only the fourth - after the United States, Russia and China - to achieve the feat. It would also have made India the first country to complete a soft landing near the South Pole on its first attempt.