India’s space agency says it has lost communication with its unmanned spacecraft that was set to touch down Saturday on the moon’s south pole.
“Communications from lander to ground station was lost,” said K Sivan, chairman of the Indian Space Research Organization. “The data is being analyzed.”
It is not clear if the mission had failed.
A successful landing would make India just the fourth country to land a vessel on the lunar surface, and only the third nation to operate a robotic rover there.
The roughly $140 million mission, known as Chandrayaan-2, is intended to study permanently shadowed moon craters that are thought to contain water deposits that were confirmed by the Chandrayaan-1 mission in 2008.