Chandrayaan-2 lander spot discovered and NASA has stepped out to credit the Chennai mechanical engineer who has found the impact site of Vikram and wrapped up the mystery of missing spacecraft.
The US space agency credited Shanmuga Subramanian with a tip for making India’s greatest space discovery of the Vikram lander that made a hard-landing on Moon’s surface on September 7, 2019.
Also addressed as Shan, the computer programmer works as a technical architect at Lennox India Technology Centre in Chennai. He discovered the Chandrayaan-2’s Vikram lander at the south pole of Moon’s surface by studying lunar images from Nasa’s Moon’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) captured between September 17 and November 11.
After finding the debris in the images he wrote to Nasa and the space agency authenticated it after taking some time.
Nasa’s deputy project scientist (LRO mission) John Keller wrote back to Shanmuga, “Thank you for your email informing us of your discovery of debris from the Vikram lander. The LROC team confirmed that the location does exhibit changes in images taken before and after the date of the landing.”
Both Nasa and Isro had been looking for the missing prized lander since September 7.
Isro launched Chandrayaan-2 on July 22 and was expected to land on September 7. The lander went incommunicado just two minutes before the landing, which was believed to have made a hard landing on the lunar surface.
Keller congratulated Shanmuga for his hardwork and later tweeted about it.
He was earlier an employee of Cognizant and worked as a programme analyst there.
