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Federal Minister for Science and Technology Fawad Chaudhry took a jibe at the failed Indian moon mission, terming the Indian spacecraft as ‘toy’ and saying the spacecraft must have landed in Mumbai.
The federal minister made the comments in a tweet on Saturday while responding to an Indian user of the micro-blogging website.
Chaudhry advised the Indian netizens and others to sleep instead of waiting for an announcement from the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) about the moon mission.
In another tweet, he said the Indian parliament should hold their prime minister Narendra Modi accountable for wasting the poor nation’s huge amount of money.
“Modi is giving speech on satellite communication as though he was actually an astronaut, not a politician,” the federal minister said.
Chandrayaan-2 — or Moon Chariot 2 — took off on July 22 carrying an orbiter, lander and rover almost entirely designed and made in India, a week after an initial launch was halted just before blast-off.
ISRO had acknowledged before the soft landing that it was a complex manoeuvre, which Sivan called “15 minutes of terror”.
The lander — named after Vikram A. Sarabhai, the father of India’s space programme — aimed to be the first to reach the lunar South Pole region.
It was carrying rover Pragyan, wisdom in the Sanskrit language, which was due to emerge several hours after touchdown.
The rover was expected to explore craters for clues on the origin and evolution of the Moon, and also for evidence on how much water the polar region contains.
However, Indian hopes to become just the fourth country after the United States, Russia and China to successfully land on the Moon, dashed to pieces. It lost contact with its unmanned spacecraft just before it was due to land on the Moon on Saturday, in a blow to the country’s ambitious low-cost lunar programme