Chandrayaan 2 Landing LIVE: Efforts Were Worth it & So Was the Journey, PM Modi Tells Scientists

Chandrayaan 2 Landing LIVE: Addressing scientists at Bengaluru’s ISRO control centre, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said the best is yet to come in our space programme, and India is with their scientists. “Learnings from today will make us stronger and better. There will be a new dawn. When ISRO has its encyclopedia of success, some hurdles cannot put its flight out of trajectory,” he said hours after India lost contact with Chandrayaan-2 lander Vikram.

The status of Chandrayaan 2 mission is unknown hours after Chandrayaan 2’s lander Vikram began final descent towards the moon and lost contact with ground control around 2.1 km from the lunar surface. A dejected ISRO chairman briefed Prime Minister Narendra Modi who was at the ISRO headquarters to witness what would have been a historic feat. K Sivan also told mediapersons that ISRO was analyzing the data last sent by the lander.

As per a timeline released earlier by ISRO, the lander Vikram was to land at 1:53am and the rover Pragyan was scheduled to roll down a ramp at 5:19am. A successful landing would have made India just the fourth country to land a vessel on the lunar surface, and only the third nation to operate a robotic rover there.

What happened to Chandrayaan 2, whether it landed on the moon or if the mission ended in failure will be known only when ISRO makes a formal announcement. Support and plaudits, meanwhile, poured in for the space agency from across India, with many lauding their efforts in taking India within touching distance of the moon.

The roughly $140 million mission, known as Chandrayaan-2, was intended to study permanently shadowed moon craters that are thought to contain water deposits that were confirmed by the Chandrayaan 1 mission in 2008.

The space agency’s chairman had earlier called Chandrayaan-2 the “most complex mission ever” undertaken by the space agency.

The mission lifted off on July 22 from the Satish Dhawan space centre, in Sriharikota, an island off the coast of the southern state of Andhra Pradesh.

After its launch on July 22, Chandrayaan 2 spent several weeks making its way to the moon, ultimately entering lunar orbit on Aug 20.

On September 2, Vikram separated from the mission’s orbiter, and the lander began a series of braking maneuvers to lower its orbit and ready itself for landing.

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