Eight years after it went missing in space, India's first lunar spacecraft, Chandrayaan 1, has been "rediscovered" by NASA.
On Oct 22, 2008, Chandrayaan 1 left the Earth to orbit the moon. It immediately discovered the first water on the lunar surface last Nov 14 of the same year. Unfortunately, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) lost all contact with the spacecraft on Aug 29, 2009. Experts believed that the most probable cause is a tragic crash.
Chandrayaan 1: Lost & Found
According to New Indian Express, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) latest radar technology found Chandrayaan 1. Meanwhile, the same radar pioneered by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) scientists located NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter too. "This technique could assist planners of future moon missions," the agency noted.
Krishnaswamy Kasturirangan, the father of India's lunar mission, said that to be declared lost and then found after eight years is a great accomplishment. For the record, Chandrayaan 1 is the country's first interplanetary mission. On the other hand, Chandrayaan 2 is already on the way, scheduled for blast off later in 2018.
The current Chairman of ISRO, A.S. Kiran Kumar, revealed that spotting Chandrayaan 1 does not bring any significance to their next mission. "There is nothing that can be done to reestablish contact with the spacecraft," Kumar admitted. Per the same source, he explained that there is no more power in the shuttle and the solar panels that provide data to other systems on board have already snapped.
Exact location of Chandrayaan 1
Hindustan Times reported that Chandrayaan 1 is still orbiting the moon around 200 kilometers (km) above the lunar surface, based on JPL's calculations. With normal optical telescopes, finding small derelict space debris hidden around Earth's satellite is difficult. The Indian shuttle is approximately 1.5 meters on each side, about the size of a small car.
Nevertheless, the application of the interplanetary radar from NASA successfully "rediscovered" the two spacecraft hiding behind the lunar surface. ISRO reportedly ran models that predicted the trajectory of Chandrayaan 1. Thus, when NASA announced that it found an unknown object at a particular position on the moon, ISRO knew that it was their beloved vehicle.
Kumar further noted that their models could identify the location of Chandrayaan 1 "at any given point of time after 10 years" or even a century. In an announcement made last Friday, NASA said it used its 70-meter antenna at Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex in California. The Indian shuttle was around 3.80 lakh (hundred thousand) km away from Earth.
