Panaji/Bangalore, Aug 30 - India's first lunar mission Chandrayaan-1 has been terminated abruptly after repeated attempts to restore radio contact with the spacecraft failed, a top space official said Sunday.

'We had to terminate the mission as we don't have contact with the spacecraft. Though we are disappointed with what has happened, we have managed to salvage a large volume of data,' Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) Chairman G. Madhavan Nair told reporters at Panaji.

The space agency's deep space network (DSN) at Byalalu, about 40 km from Bangalore, lost radio contact with the mooncraft early Saturday while orbiting at 200 km away from the lunar surface.

Repeated attempts to re-establish the communication link with the beleaguered spacecraft from the space agency's telemetry, tracking and command network (Istrac) at Peenya on the outskirts of the city turned futile.

'Our expert team has come to a conclusion that it is not possible to restore the radio link, as the computers onboard the spacecraft for controlling the mission are non-functional for various reasons. Without the computers functioning, the mission cannot proceed,' Nair pointed out.

DSN last received data from the lunarcraft at 00:25 IST Saturday when it was over the Indian subcontinent region.

The space agency has set up an assessment committee to look into the performance of the mission in totality, including the reasons for malfunctioning of its critical star sensor, antennae and the computers onboard.

'The moon mission was a great success and 95 percent of its objective was completed. We could collect a large volume of data, including 70,000 images of the moon,' Nair added.

The computers on board the craft could have malfunctioned, triggering off the communication failure, he added.

'The power signals which go to the computer systems failed and we had to terminate the mission,' Nair said, adding that the spacecraft was orbiting the moon at a distance of about 200 km and it would take nearly 1,000 days for it to hit the moon's surface.

'We have already initiated discussions with the US and Russia to use their radars to track the orbiting spacecraft,' Nair said.