Engineer Shanmuga Subramanian has been acknowledged by NASA for helping them with finding the debris of the lander of Chandrayaan 2. He found the debris from the Vikram moon lander that scientists had been looking for and helped them find it.
NASA on Tuesday found Vikram Lander of Chandrayaan-2 and released images of its impact site on the Moon, where the spacecraft had lost communication moments before making a soft landing on the far side of the lunar surface.
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NASA posted images clicked by its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) Camera, showing the site’s changes on the Moon and the impact point before and after the spacecraft had made a hard-landing on the lunar surface.
The first person to come up with identification was Shanmuga Subramanian, an IT professional from Chennai, who told sources that NASA’s inability to find the lander had sparked his interest.
Shanmuga, who’s from Madurai had earlier worked for Cognizant as a program analyst used lunar images from Nasa’s Moon’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) captured on different dates and studied them for weeks.
“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,” he said, adding he was helped by fellow Twitter and Reddit users. He said, “It was quite hard, but I spent some effort.”
He also twitted saying NASA has credited me for finding Vikram Lander.
@NASA has credited me for finding Vikram Lander on Moon’s surface#VikramLander #Chandrayaan2@timesofindia @TimesNow @NDTV pic.twitter.com/2LLWq5UFq9
— Shan (@Ramanean) December 2, 2019
He added, “I feel elated that NASA acknowledged my contribution, I used NASA’s images to make my observations. It is difficult to spot debris on moon, I could only spot one piece of debris.”
Shanmuga wrote to Nasa about his findings for which the US space agency took some time to confirm it.
The Vikram Lander had successfully separated from Chandrayaan-2 Orbiter on September 2. After revolving around the Earth’s orbit for nearly 23 days, the craft had begun its journey to the moon on August 14.