Vikram no longer responds ... The Indian Space Agency (ISRO) lost contact Saturday with the uninhabited probe that was to make India the fourth nation to put a device on the moon, and acter the return of the man on this natural satellite considered a relay to Mars.
"The whole country is proud of you"
ISRO had anticipated a delicate moment by saying it was preparing to live "15 minutes of terror" during the landing attempt of the lander Vikram. And this quarter of an hour justified these fears. "The descent of the Vikram undercarriage was proceeding as planned," said Kailasavadivoo Sivan, 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."
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who came to Bangalore, responded by assuring scientists that what they had done was "no small feat". "Life goes up and down, your hard work has taught us a lot and the whole country is proud of you". "If the communication (with the lander) is restored (...) all hopes are allowed (...) Our journey will continue ... Be strong, I am with you," said the Prime Minister.
Launched on July 22 with a firing point in southern India, the Vikram landing gear of the Chandrayaan-2 mission was to land between 01:30 and 02:30 Saturday Indian time (20h-21h Friday GMT) near the lunar south pole, at the end of a month and a half of orbital rotations around the Earth then the Moon. Once immobilized, he had to release between 05:30 and 06:30 a small mobile robot, supposed to operate through solar energy for about fourteen days on land and perform scientific surveys.
But the moon landing phase is as crucial as it is delicate. If the machine does not slow down enough, it comes too fast and shatters against the desolate surface. In April, an Israeli lunar probe missed its moon landing and crashed.
"Where will probably be the future human settlements"
India's ambition was to become the fourth nation in the world to successfully land a plane on Selenite soil, after the Soviet Union, the United States and China. Above all, Chandrayaan-2 - "Lunar Trolley" in Hindi - was to be the first spacecraft to land in the South Pole region, unexplored by man. Previous lunar landings, notably those of the American Apollo program, occurred at the equator on the visible side of the Moon. At the beginning of the year, a Chinese probe was first laid on the hidden side.
"India is going where the future human settlements will probably be in 20, 50 or 100 years," said Mathieu Weiss, French CNES representative in India. "That's why the whole scientific community is following this mission."