Chennai Techie Finds Vikram Lander Three Months After Crash On Moon, In A NASA Image

For almost three months, world¡¯s space agencies including NASA have been searching for the Vikram lander or its remnants on the moon, without any success. It has finally been found, not by NASA or ISRO, but a techie from Chennai who spotted the debris of Chandrayaan-2's Vikram lander on Moon's south pole with the help of US space agency NASA's images.

Shanmuga Subramanian (Shan), is a mechanical engineer and a computer programmer and he works as a technical architect at engineering company Lennox India Technology Centre in Chennai.

_{Image Credit: Facebook}

Chandrayaan-2 lost all contact with after it made a hard landing on the Moon¡¯s surface on September 7, 2019.

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.

After the discovery, Shanmuga wrote to NASA about his findings. The US space agency took its time to confirm Shanmuga¡¯s discovery and after authenticating his discovery NASA's deputy project scientist (LRO mission) John Keller wrote to him, "Thank you for your email informing us of your discovery of debris from the Vikram lander. The LROC team confirmed that the location does exhibit changes in images taken before and after the date of the landing. Using the information, the LROC team did additional searches in this area and located the site of the primary impact as well as other debris around the impact location and has announced the sighting on the Nasa and ASU pages where you have been given credit for your observation."

Keller congratulated Shanmuga and further wrote, "Congratulations for what I am sure was a lot of time and effort on your part. We apologise for the delay in getting back to you as we needed to be certain of our interpretation as well as making sure that all stakeholders had an opportunity to comment before we could announce the results."

NASA later shared the news with the world and tweeted, ¡®The Chandrayaan-2 Vikram lander has been found by our NasaMoon mission, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. See the first mosaic of the impact site¡¯, An image of Moon with blue and green dots show the impact point of Vikram and an associated debris field.

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

¡ª NASA (@NASA) December 2, 2019

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, are about 750 metres northwest of the crash site.

NASA had been using its deep space network antennas in California, Madrid and Canberra to send signals to the Vikram lander, in the hope that if the lander¡¯s systems were working at all, they would reflect the signals, but all the efforts were in vain.

NASA used its orbiter LRO, to take images of the south pole region to locate the lander, and with the help of its images Shanmuga managed to find the debris.

That is probably the closure ISRO needed.