NEW DELHI: India has lost contact with its first mooncraft, an unmanned satellite launched amid much fanfare last October, the national space agency said today.

“The radio contact was lost at 1:30am IST (2000 GMT Friday) by the Deep Space Network,” the state-run Indian Space Research Organisation said in a statement here. Scientists at the organisation are reviewing data to analyse the health of the spacecraft’s systems, ISRO said.

The Chandrayaan-1 satellite was launched on October 22. A TV-set-sized probe painted

in the colours of the

Indian flag separated from the satellite and landed on the moon on November 14.

The landing of the probe on the moon’s surface vaulted the country into the league of space-faring nations led by the United States and regional neighbours Russia, China and Japan and was seen as a proud moment in the country’s development.

The first probe was intended as a first step towards landing an unmanned moon rover by 2012 and the ISRO also aims to launch satellites to study Mars and Venus.

This is the first time radio contact has been lost with the spacecraft, which suffered a setback earlier this year when one of its sensors was burnt due to solar radiation. As a result, it had to suspend some scientific experiments and raised its lunar orbit to 200 kilometres instead of the original 100 km.