Days after NASA credited Chennai techie Shanmuga Subramanian for the?discovery of moon lander Vikram, ISRO chief slammed the claim saying that the Indian space agency had already found it.
Reuters
Sivan has claimed that the Vikram Lander of Chandrayaan-2 had been spotted by the space agency's own orbiter much ahead of NASA.?
K Sivan was quoted as saying, "Our own orbiter had located Vikram lander. We had already declared that on our website, you can go back and see."
"We don't want to tell anything on this one. After the landing date itself, our website had given that our own orbiter has located Vikram," Sivan said emphatically.?
Twitter/NASA/ISRO
On ISRO's website, a statement on September 10 says, 'Vikram lander has been located by the orbiter of Chandrayaan-2, but no communication with it yet. All possible efforts are being made to establish communication with lander'.
Three days after Vikram lander crashed on the lunar surface, on September 10, ISRO had tweeted, 'Vikram Lander has been located by the orbiter of Chandrayaan 2, but no communication with it yet. All possible efforts are being made to establish communication with lander'.?
NASA had since made several attempts to locate the Chandrayaan 2 lander with the help of LRO, which flew over Vikram's landing site once on September 17 and next on October 14.
Shanmuga Subramanian, a 33-year-old mechanical engineer from Chennai said he had alerted both ISRO and NASA about the presence of the lander's debris.?
"I did send a tweet to NASA and ISRO. I sent emails to a couple of NASA scientists. They were in charge of the LRO (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter) images. I got a good response from them," Mr Subramanian told NDTV.?
Shanmuga, used lunar images from NASA's Moon's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) that were captured on different dates (September 17, October 14, 15 and November 11) and thoroughly studied them and located the debris of the lander.
BCCL
The NASA statement reads, ¡®Green dots indicate spacecraft debris. Blue dots locate disturbed soil, likely where small bits of the spacecraft churned up the regolith (moon soil). "S" indicates debris identified by Shanmuga Subramanian¡¯.?
The debris, found by Shanmuga, is about 750 metres northwest of the crash site.?But after this claim, K Sivan has blown off the steam from Shanmuga Subramanian's discovery.?
?Chandrayaan-2 was intended to study permanently shadowed moon craters that are thought to contain water deposits, that were confirmed by the Chandrayaan-1 mission in 2008.
ISRO is planning to launch Chandrayaan 3 probably in November next year.