The American space agency, NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) has released images captured by its lunar orbiter of the targeted landing site of Chandrayaan-2’s lander, Vikram.
Our @LRO_NASA mission imaged the targeted landing site of India’s Chandrayaan-2 lander, Vikram. The images were taken at dusk, and the team was not able to locate the lander. More images will be taken in October during a flyby in favorable lighting. More: https://t.co/1bMVGRKslp pic.twitter.com/kqTp3GkwuM
— NASA (@NASA) September 26, 2019
The images were taken at dusk and the NASA team was unable to locate the lander which crash landed earlier this month. According to NASA, the images are captured by Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) Quickmap and was not able to locate the lander. “The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) passed over the landing site on Sept. 17 and acquired a set of high resolution images of the area; so far the LROC team has not been able to locate or image the lander. It was dusk when the landing area was imaged and thus large shadows covered much of the terrain; it is possible that the Vikram lander is hiding in a shadow. The lighting will be favorable when LRO passes over the site in October and once again attempts to locate and image the lander,” NASA said in a statement.
On 7th September, Chandrayaan-2’s landing module had gone silent after Vikram Lander lost connection when it was merely 2 KMs from the landing surface of the moon. While ISRO was able to locate the lunar module in one piece, it had tiled a little because of the hard landing. All efforts to resume the communication has so far been unsuccessful.
