LUNAR MYSTERY

India loses communication with lunar satellite

India's national space agency said communications with the country's only satellite orbiting the moon snapped Saturday and that its scientists were no longer controlling the spacecraft.
Radio contacts with Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft were abruptly lost at 0130 Saturday (2000 GMT Friday), the Indian Space Research Organization said.
The agency's monitoring unit near the southern city of Bangalore is no longer receiving data from the spacecraft, spokesman S. Satish told The Associated Press by telephone from Bangalore.
The spacecraft had completed 312 days in orbit and orbited the moon more than 3400 times.
"We are studying the telemetry data and trying to figure out what is the problem," Satish said. The space agency had received a large volume of data from the spacecraft — which is slotted in an automatic orbit of the moon.

NASA - Bizarre Lunar Orbits

Be careful of the orbit chosen for a low-orbiting lunar satellite. "What counts is an orbit's inclination," that is, the tilt of its plane to the Moon's equatorial plane.
"There are actually a number of 'frozen orbits' where a spacecraft can stay in a low lunar orbit indefinitely.
They occur at four inclinations: 27º, 50º, 76º, and 86º" — the last one being nearly over the lunar poles.
The orbit of the relatively long-lived Apollo 15 subsatellite PFS-1 had an inclination of 28º, which turned out to be close to the inclination of one of the frozen orbits — PFS-2 was cursed with an inclination of only 11º.