Chandrayaan-2′s lander Vikram, which crashed while attempting to land on the moon in September, has been found by NASA, and the US space agency has credited a Chennai-based engineer who spent hours comparing before and after images of the landing site.
Indian space agency ISRO had lost contact with the lander shortly before the scheduled attempt to soft-land on the moon on September 7.
NASA said it released a mosaic image of the site on September 26 (but taken on September 17), 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 Shanmuga “Shan” Subramanian, a 33-year-old IT professional, whose Twitter bio now reads: “I found Vikram Lander!”.
In a statement, NASA said the “debris first located by Shanmuga Subramanian about 750 meters northwest of the main crash site and was a single bright pixel identification in that first mosaic.”
“Shanmuga Subramanian contacted the LRO project with a positive identification of debris. After receiving this tip, the LROC team confirmed the identification 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. Two subsequent image sequences were acquired on Oct. 14 and 15, and Nov. 11. The LROC team scoured the surrounding area in these new mosaics and found the impact site and associated debris field,” the statement added.
Shanmuga Subramanian, a space nerd, is excited that his hard work paid off.
“I had side-by-side comparison of those two images on two of my laptops… on one side there was the old image, and another side there was the new image released by NASA,” Shanmuga Subramanian told Agence France Presse, adding he was helped by fellow Twitter and Reddit users.
Source – NDTV
