Chennai techie explains his encounter with crashed Vikram lander

Chennai : Shanmuga Subramanian, a techie from Chennai who helped in locating the crashed Vikram lander on Moon, said that he spent many nights probing a picture of the impact site shared by NASA.

According to him, people became more curious in the project due to the crash of the Vikram lander. “I don’t think Vikram lander would have made such an impact on minds of Indian public if it had landed successfully,” he told Hindustan Times.

“I got hooked and started comparing Nasa’s picture to previous ones every night for some 4-5 days,” he said.

NASA on Tuesday officially announced the news with an image taken by its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) showcasing the crash landing site.

In a statement on Tuesday, NASA said that it released a mosaic image of the lunar site on September 26 (taken on September 17) and asked people to compare images of the area before and after the crash of Vikram lander.

ISRO had made an attempt to soft-land Vikram lander on the lunar surface on September 7. But, lost its contact during the final stage.

To find the location of Vikram lander, he also went through Isro’s live images and zeroed in on 2 sq km around the landing area.

“I searched around the north of the landing spot and found a tiny little dot. When I compared it to LRO images of the site from the last 9 years, the debris was located and I reached out to NASA,” Shanmugham said.