NASA’s Lunar Reconnaisance Orbiter (LRO) payload, Lunar Reconnaisance Orbiter Camera (LRO-C) released news early morning on December 3, 2019 that they had located wreckage of Vikram, the lander on India’s Chandrayaan 2 mission. The post credited the find to a Chennai based techie, Shanmuga Subramanian.
Shanmuga located the wreckage by comparing images released by LRO-C on September 26 (but taken on September 17) with the ones released earlier. He alerted NASA and ISRO about his find via Twitter. NASA’s LROC team then imaged the area again in October and November to confirm the debris. He got no response from ISRO as per news reports.
On the next day, ISRO’s Chairman in a statement to the press said that they had already located the lander on the day after the crash. ISRO’s statements from the period said that while the lander was located, efforts were on to establish communication with it. NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN) continued efforts to hail Vikram after the crash.
As a scientific organisation, ISRO should know that until they publish, they cannot claim a discovery. The Chairman’s reference to the statement published on the ISRO website only says that they have located the lander. LROC’s success here is locating the debris and publishing the same with image data.
Media reports then claimed that the lander was intact. This was based on a statement received from someone within ISRO. I don’t think news organisations would publish something like this without an inside source. This points to the fact that ISRO did not know the condition in which the Lander was in.
The text released with the LROC image states that the lander wreckage is found 750 meters from the landing site. In Parliament, ISRO submitted a report stating that Vikram hard landed within 500 meters from the designated landing site. This is an aberration. Sankaranarayanan Viswanathan analysed NASA’s own orbital data and released it on Reddit that the site maybe 520 meters from the designated landing site. This seems closer to ISRO’s report than the LROC team’s finding.
This is a nice finish for the articles I write on the Chandrayaan 2 lander, the last of which you can find here. This allows scientists to study the debris to understand Vikram’s last few minutes on the Moon that could help scientists better design Chandrayaan 3’s lander.
I do hope ISRO proactively releases information like this and encourage citizen scientists like Shanmuga. We need more not less of this.
Parallel Spirals 