The NASA has located ISRO’s Vikram Lander on the moon surface. NASA’s Moon Mission located Chandrayaan 2’s and has released images of the impact site.
The #Chandrayaan2 Vikram lander has been found by our @NASAMoon mission, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. See the first mosaic of the impact site https://t.co/GA3JspCNuh pic.twitter.com/jaW5a63sAf
— NASA (@NASA) December 2, 2019
According to NASA, the green dots in the above image indicate confirmed or likely spacecraft debris. The blue dots indicate disturbed soil where small bits of the spacecraft churned up the regolith. The ‘S’ in the above image indicates debris identified by Shanmuga Subramanian.
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The above images were taken by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) camera which shows change in moon’s surface due to impact of Vikram Lander’s hand landing. Chandrayaan 2 was scheduled for a soft landing on the intervening night of 6th and 7th September, 2019 but lost contact minutes before it could land. After the LRO released first images taken on 17th September, 2019 on 26th September, 2019, Shanmuga Subramanian contacted the LRO project after positively identifying the debris. Following this, the LRO team confirmed the identification by comparing before and after images. The debris identified by Shanmuga is about 750 mtrs northwest of main crash site.
Shanmuga, who was credited by NASA for finding the Vikram Lander, is a mechanical engineer based in Chennai.
@NASA has credited me for finding Vikram Lander on Moon’s surface#VikramLander #Chandrayaan2@timesofindia @TimesNow @NDTV pic.twitter.com/2LLWq5UFq9
— Shan (@Ramanean) December 2, 2019
On 17th November, he had tweeted to NASA at possible landing site of Vikram Lander. He had also written to NASA about his discovery.
@NASA @LRO_NASA @isro
This might be Vikram lander’s crash site (Lat:-70.8552 Lon:21.71233 ) & the ejecta that was thrown out of it might have landed over here https://t.co/8uKZv7oXQa (The one on the left side was taken on July 16th & one on the right side was from Sept 17) pic.twitter.com/WNKOUy2mg1— Shan (@Ramanean) November 17, 2019
Read: As ISRO loses contact with Vikram Lander, NDTV journalist arrogantly yells at scientist
Earlier in September, NASA had released images captured by its lunar orbiter of the targeted landing site of Chandrayaan-2’s lander, Vikram. However, at that time NASA was unable to locate Vikram.
Chandrayaan 2
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.
