India's first unmanned mission to the moon Chandrayaan-I was launched successfully in October 2008. Photo by BGNES
Indian space scientists have lost contact with their unmanned moon mission, Chandrayaan-I, which includes a Bulgarian made payload.
System failures on the Chandrayaan-I apparently led to loss of contact, said S. Satish, a spokesman for the Indian Space Research Organization.
"We are trying to revive the contact, but chances are slim," Satish said.
One of the eleven payloads that the Chandrayaan 1 rocket carries was made in Bulgaria's Solar-Earth Influence Laboratory of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, which is based in Sofia.
The Bulgarian-made payload is RADOM - a 256 channel spectrometer of the absorbed space radiation known internationally as "Lyulin".
During Chandrayaan mission, "Lyulin" read the quantitative and qualitative measures of the radiation fields of galaxy and sun rays at 100 km above the moon surface.
The data from the Bulgarian device will be used to estimate the radiation risks for austronauts future missions.
The Indian space organization had originally announced that Chandrayaan-I would stay in orbit for two years.
Chandrayaan-I has met most of its scientific objectives by providing "large volume of data," the space organization said. In 312 days, it completed more than 3 400 orbits around the moon, according to the space organization.
Chandrayaan-I aimed to take high-resolution, three-dimensional images of the lunar surface, especially the permanently-shadowed polar regions.
The launch took place at Sriharikota about 80 km from city of Chennai on October 22 2008. With it, India joined the USA, the former Soviet Union, the European Space Agency, and its Asian neighbors China and Japan as the countries that have sent missions to the moon.