Though for months there was not information around the Chandrayaan 2 debris site from NASA, finally NASA has found the site and informed the world about it in its teeth few days back. Am Indian amateur astromer Shanmuga Subramanian was involved in study and pointing out the debris of it. Though ISRO did mention through its tweet that they had located the Vikram lander but they could not establish communication NASA’s long standing Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter failed to locate it.
Though it took a lot of time for NASA to broadcast that information around the findings of the debris of Vikram lander that too when Shanmuga tweeted to NASA after his own study is when the broadcast came. Vikram was around 8.3 ft in size and the debris site showed largest piece of size 4.5 feet as per Indian space agency. Many amaetures spent a lot of time looking for the debirs of vikram lander as soon as the pictures started airing. LROC released images on November 11 showing the impact of the lander on the moon and how it affected the surface of the moon. The imaging experts also pointed about the crash evidence along with the landers debris and also the places where the lander hit the moons surface and crashed into pieces.
It was on September 6, 2019 which was the ambitious day decided for the Chandrayaan 2 mission’s Vikram lander to touchbase the moon surface but just around 2.5 km from the moon, it went silent. The connection was lost. Though ISRO claim to have located the lander immediately after it hard landed on moon, NASA denied so because its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter could not do so. After NASA published images from the LROC orbit over the impact site on September 17, they could not find the impact site or the remains. It is when Shanmuga Subramanian happened to spot one brigh pixel and then communicated the same with LROC team about it is when LROC team studied the better images received in November 2019, to showed the changes that occurred due to the hard landing.
While, its now clear that the Vikram lander hard lander on the moon, it has given rise to a new spat between ISRO and NASA, that NASA had known that Vikram had hard landed but did not reveal the same earlier.
*Sourced from Internet
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