The head of India's state-run space agency on Sunday hailed the country's first moon mission a success, despite losing contact with the spacecraft.

"The mission was a great success," G. Madhavan Nair, chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), told reporters in the state capital of Goa, Panaji, where a conference on low-budget space missions opens this week.

Nair, who said 95 percent of the Chandrayaan-I project's objectives had been completed, admitted scientists were disappointed with the development, but said a "large volume" of data was collected, including 70 000 images of the moon.

India launched the unmanned satellite and put a probe on the moon's surface to great fanfare and national pride late last year, propelling the country into the league of space-faring nations.

ISRO announced on Saturday that the $80-million project was over after losing radio contact with the satellite early on Friday, blaming a computer malfunction for cutting communications.

The satellite is now likely to crash onto the moon's surface.

The mission had been expected to last two years and was intended as a first step towards landing an unmanned moon rover by 2012. India also aims to launch satellites to study Mars and Venus as well as a manned space flight by 2020.

Nair told a news conference that a formal inquiry into what went wrong would be launched as a matter of course to learn lessons for future projects.

But he added: "We have found that all the instruments on the spacecraft worked satisfactorily and the entire scientific instruments have performed. That is how we could collect a large volume of data.

"We survived for 315 days, which is a good record. Many such experiments have burnt within a month in the past."