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Washington, December 3
NASA has found India’s Chandrayaan-2’s Vikram lander, which crashed on the surface of the Moon in September, the US space agency said on Tuesday, crediting a Chennai-based mechanical engineer for helping it trace the debris of the ambitious lunar mission by painstakingly comparing before and after images of the landing site.
NASA’s confirmation came nearly three months after India’s Chandrayaan-2 mission made a hard landing near the uncharted lunar south pole in the wee hours of September 7. “The Chandrayaan-2 Vikram lander has been found by our NASA Moon mission, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. See the first mosaic of the impact site,” NASA said in a tweet sharing before and after images captured by its moon-revolving Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO).
On September 7, the Indian Space Research Organisation attempted a soft landing of Vikram on the Moon. However, ISRO lost contact with Vikram shortly before the scheduled touchdown.
NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) team had released the first mosaic of images acquired during its September 17 flyby of the Moon.
NASA released the mosaic image of the site on September 26, inviting people to compare it with images of the same area before the crash to find signs of the lander. The first person to come up with a positive identification was Chennai-based 33-year-old IT professional Shanmuga Subramanian, who confirmed the identification of the crashing site of Vikram by comparing before and after images.
“When the images for the first mosaic were acquired the impact point was poorly illuminated and thus not easily identifiable,” NASA said in a statement, adding that two subsequent image sequences were acquired on October 14 and 15, and November 11.
The LROC team scoured the surrounding area in these new mosaics and found the impact point about 2,500 feet to the southeast of the planned touchdown site, and a spray of debris emanating outwards. On October 3, Subramanian tagged the Twitter handles of NASA, LROC and ISRO in a tweet, asking, “Is this Vikram lander? (1 km from the landing spot) Lander might have been buried in Lunar sand?”.
On November 17, he further zeroed in on his observations and tweeted out the possible crash site of the lander. “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.” As it turns out, Subramanian was spot on with his inferences, and now NASA has lauded him for finding the lander. — PTI
Scanned gigabytes of images
Chennai-based Shanmuga Subramanian (33) said he had to view many gigabytes of images released by NASA over three weeks
Says he did so sans any high-end technology or other gadgets that led him to his “eureka moment”
Hailing from temple town of Madurai, he says he used two laptops to identify the site where Vikram crashed and to compare the satellite images captured before and after
Every day after returning from work at a top IT firm, he used to analyse data between 10 pm and 2 am and again from 8 am to 10 am before going to office
NASA said the debris first located by Shanmuga is about 750 metres northwest of the main crash site and was a single bright pixel identification in that first mosaic
After receiving this tip, the LROC team confirmed the identification by comparing the images
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