Bengaluru: Hopes to salvage the lander-rover, part of the Chandrayaan-2 mission, are fading with the window of opportunity to restore link with 'Vikram' closing in, in about a week's time. Lander Vikram lost communication with ground-station on September 7 during final descent. The lander and rover have a mission life of one Lunar day, which is equivalent to 14 earth days — that means ISRO now has just over a week to spring Vikram back to life.

"Progressively, you can imagine that it becomes that much more difficult, with each passing hour, the available power on the battery gets drained out, and there won't be anything left for it to power and operate", an ISRO official said. "With every passing minute, the situation becomes worse only...less and less probable to establish contact with Vikram", he said. "It looks more and more remote only", the official said when asked if there was a slender chance of re-establishing the link.