Bangalore, Sep 13 - Indian media should stop criticising the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) for abruptly terminating Chandrayaan-1 and instead applaud the success of its moon mission, a European space scientist has said.

Although its life was cut short, ISRO's Chandrayaan-1 was a 'fantastic success', Detlef Koschny, European Chandrayaan-1 project scientist, said in an e-mail interview. Chandrayaan-1 had carried three scientific payloads of the European Space Agency (ESA).

All the European teams were 'much excited' about the results they got, he said. 'I think (the) Indian press should stop trying to put ISRO down. You should rather acknowledge the fantastic achievements your space agency did,' he said, listing many of the achievements.

'You sent a spacecraft to the Moon and entered a low lunar orbit -- a very high challenge which is already a fantastic success,' Koschny told IANS.

'Secondly, all scientific instruments were commissioned and worked flawlessly. The data came down, over a distance of about 400,000 km and it was put together into images, atomic counts etc.'

'To have a spacecraft survive in such an environment for such a long time is not simple -- you should congratulate them (ISRO) for this,' Koschny said, adding that all principal investigators in Europe felt as he did.

Koschny said ESA scientists' appreciation has been communicated to ISRO in a statement by Stas Barabash, principal investigator of the Sub KeV Atom Reflecting Analyser (SARA), one of the three ESA payloads on board Chandrayaan-1.

The SARA experiment was expected to reveal the surface composition of the moon and associated magnetic anomalies by studying the interaction of solar wind with the moon's surface.