ISRO confident of Chandrayaan-I

The Indian Space Research Organisation's (ISRO) first lunar mission Chandrayaan-I may have suffered technical setbacks within a year of its launch, but the organisation is confident that the spacecraft will complete its mission.

"The failure of electronic components within a year of a satellite's launch is one of the risks that a mission faces. Once the satellite crosses one year, then one can expect stable operation for several years to come," M. Annadurai, project director of Chandrayaan-I and II, told IANS from Bangalore on phone.

Chandrayaan-I's onboard star sensor -- a critical component that guides the spacecraft -- failed May 16 owing to heat around the moon. What compounded the problem was that the standby unit also failed.

Though another component on the spacecraft -- the Bus Management Unit -- also failed, the satellite was able to switch on the standby unit.

To manage the situation, ISRO hit upon an innovate technique. It used the redundant sensors-gyroscopes -- along with antenna pointing information and images of specific location on the surface of the moon -- for determining the spacecraft's orientation.

Curiously on May 20, ISRO raised the spacecraft that was orbiting the moon at a height of 100 km (originally intended orbital height) since November last year to 200 km stating that it would now be imaging the lunar surface with a wider swath.