India's space agency has abandoned its inaugural moon mission a day after scientists lost communication with the Bulgarian equipped Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft.

"We don't have contact... and we had to terminate...," said G Madhavan Nair, the head of Isro - the Indian Space Research Organisation.

Despite the termination of the mission, Nair told reporters that the project was a great success and 95% of its objectives had been completed.

"We could collect a large volume of data, including 70 000 images of the moon," he added.

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.

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.

We need your support so Novinite.com can keep delivering news and information about Bulgaria! Thank you!