Vikram Lander Traced on Moon's Surface; Details Inside

NASA's Vikram Lander became a mystery from the time it lost contact with ISRO control room in Sriharikota, Andhra Pradesh. But almost after months later lander has now been confirmed to have crash-landed on the Moon's surface.

A Chennai-based 33-year-old engineer Shanmuga Subramanian finally uncovered Vikram lander's fate. NASA credited him for informing them about the presence of the debris of the lander of Chandrayaan 2. Shan took to Twitter to let the world know that it was NASA itself that credited him for finding the debris from the Vikram moon lander which ultimately helped the space agency trace the exact location of the lander.

 NASA disclosed in a tweet that its LRC (Lunar Reconnaissance) orbiter spotted Chandrayaan 2 Vikram lander. Remarkably, this is the first time that NASA succeeded in tracing the impact site and the lander. NASA shared an image that shows the Vikram lander hard-landing impact point and associated debris field.

NASA points out in the shared image, "Green dots indicate spacecraft debris (confirmed or likely). Blue dots locate disturbed soil, likely where small bits of the spacecraft churned up the regolith."

It further said, "The debris first located by Shanmuga is about 750 meters northwest of the main crash site and was a single bright pixel identification in that first mosaic."

NASA has also described the process of identifying the Vikram lander. "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 November 11. The LROC team scoured the surrounding area in these new mosaics and found the impact site (70.8810°S, 22.7840°E, 834 m elevation) and associated debris field. The November mosaic had the best pixel scale (0.7 meters) and lighting conditions (72° incidence angle)," NASA explained in a statement released on Tuesday.