Bangalore, Aug 21 - India's first lunarcraft Chandrayaan-1 Friday conducted a joint experiment with Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) of the US's National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to trace presence of ice in a dark crater near the North Pole of the moon, the Indian space agency said.

'The unique bi-static experiment was carried out jointly when Chandrayaan and Orbiter came closer while orbiting over the lunar North Pole where the permanently shadowed crater is located,' the state-run Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) said in a statement here.

Indian space scientists will analyse the data received from NASA's miniature radio frequency instrument on board Chandrayaan and the Orbiter to ascertain the existence of water and ice in the permanently shadowed crater.

'Chandrayaan transmitted the signals and the Orbiter received the reflected signals through the instrument, which functions as a synthetic aperture radar (SAR). The four-minute experiment used both the radars to point at Erlanger Crater at the same time,' the statement said.

Prior to the experiment, the Orbiter made a minor manoeuvre to adjust its orbit to that of Chandrayaan, located 200 km above from the lunar surface.

The experiment was conducted at 00:30 IST from the spacecraft control centre of ISRO telemetry, tracking and command network (Istrac) at Peenya, 20 km from this tech hub.

The data was soon downloaded from the Orbiter at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in the US, the ground station that had the visibility.