Days after the Indian Space Research Organization’s (ISRO) attempts to establish communication with the solar-powered Vikram lander and Pragyan rover of the Chandrayaan 3 mission, former ISRO chairman A S Kiran on Friday signalled a possible end to India’s third lunar mission.

“There won’t be any more hope of reviving. Now, if it should have happened, it should have happened by now. There is (now) no chance at all,” the ex-Chairman, who was actively associated with the Chandrayaan 3 mission, told news agency PTI.

After an eventful month on the lunar surface, the Indian space agency began efforts to establish communication with Chandrayaan 3’s lander and rover on September 22. However, no signals have been received from them as of now.

On Chandrayaan 3’s success

The former ISRO chairman said that the success of Chandrayaan 3 will “benefit subsequent (missions) both in terms of knowledge and in terms of planning the activities that need to be done in that region.”

“In the larger sense, what you have achieved definitely is you have reached an area (south pole) where nobody else has gone and got in-situ data of that region. And that is actually very useful information,” he told PTI.

According to Kiran Kumar, there may be a possibility of ISRO undertaking a sample-return mission to the Moon, however, did not give any timeframe to undertake such a venture.

“…In the future, many of these things will be in the works. Plans will be made and then proposals will be put up based on the overall vision of technology development. It purely depends on how the overall planning happens, and how many resources are made available, so it’s very difficult to tell (the time-frame for the sample-return mission),” he said.

India scripted history on August 23 by becoming the first-ever country to touch down near the lunar south pole, and the fourth in the world to achieve soft-landing on the lunar surface after the US, the former Soviet Union, and China.

(With inputs from PTI)