PANAJI, INDIA: Three days after the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) admitted the abrupt end of its Chandrayaan-1 mission, a leading US-based scientist associated with the project Wednesday termed it "a complete success", but added that "what we have not achieved is our ultimate goal, which was a much more extended mission that was to be achieved during the full two years".

Speaking to reporters here on the sidelines of an ISRO-sponsored conference, Carle Pieters, science manager at the NASA-supported spectrology facility at the Brown University in the US, said: "I think it's a complete success."

"The achievements are very difficult to accomplish. We are very happy to be a part of this adventure," said Pieters, who was in charge of the moon mineralogy mapper of Chandrayaan-1.

"What we have not achieved is our ultimate goal, which was a much more extended mission that was to be achieved during the full two years. But, the first phase of what we wanted to accomplish, we were able to accomplish and we will be working with the data in the future," she averred.

Asked to comment on ISRO chairman G Madhavan Nair's claim that 95 per cent of the objectives were achieved, Pieters was noncommittal. "I can't claim in one way or the other as I have information only on my experiment," she maintained.

©IANS