Vikram lander
An illustration of how Chandrayaan-2's Vikram lander planned to touch down on the moon. The spacecraft lost contact with controllers in the final phases of its descent Sept. 6 and has not been heard from since.

The Indian government has offered new details about what happened during its first attempt to land on the moon in September.

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Jeff Foust has more than a decade of experience writing about space policy, entrepreneurial ventures and regulatory affairs. In 2001, he established spacetoday.net to aggregate and summarize the day's space-related news stories. In 2003, he started The...