The Indian Space Agency announced Saturday, September 7, lost contact with its spacecraft that it was trying to land on the moon. This is a setback for India, which aims to become the fourth nation to place a camera on the star, and the first to inspect the lunar south pole.

"The descent of the Vikram Lander was proceeding as planned," said Sivan, the president of the space agency (ISRO), in the control room in Bangalore (south). "Then the communication between the undercarriage and the ground control was lost and the data is being analyzed," he added.

The contact was lost with the probe as it entered the penultimate phase of its descent to the Moon, which began around 20:07 GMT.

The launch of this second lunar mission named Chandrayaan-2, originally scheduled for July, had been postponed for the first time for technical reasons. She finally left on July 22nd.

India, which has successfully completed its first space mission 11 years ago, hopes that Israel will become the fourth power to land a craft after the United States, Russia and China.

However, this is the third failure of ISRO since the beginning of the year.

"The data is under review," President K Sivan told the Bangalore Monitoring Center before an assembly of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and scientists in distress.

This is Mission Control Center. #VikramLander descent has been planned and normal performance was observed at an altitude of 2.1 km. Subsequently, communication from Lander to the ground stations was lost. Data is being analyzed # ISRO

ISRO (@isro) 6 September 2019

He assured the scientists after the announcement of K. Sivan that "what (they) had done was not a small feat". "Life is going up and down, your hard work has taught us a lot and the whole country is proud of you," he added. "If the communication (with the lander) is restored (...) all hopes are allowed (...) Our journey will continue ... Be strong, I am with you," assured the Prime Minister.

China succeeded in January laying a probe on the far side of the moon, a first in space exploration; in April, the probe launched by Israel has however crashed on the surface of the Moon, victim of a series of technical failures during its descent.

With Reuters and AFP