Chandrayaan 2: NASA’s LRO fails to spot Vikram lander due to ‘long shadows’ over landing site
New Delhi: In what Indians might refer to as a “misfortune”, a NASA satellite currently orbiting the moon has reportedly failed to spot the Vikram lander near South Pole Region, where it fell silent after having lost contact with the earth in its attempt to make a soft-landing on the moon on 7 September.
The 17 September attempt by NASA to spot India’s first lander on the moon marks ten days since contact was lost. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter’s Camera instrument (LROC) imaged the landing site of the lander as planned on Wednesday, according to a report by Aviation Week. However, “long shadows in the area may be obscuring the silent lunar explorer,” the report concludes.
The 17 September LRO flyover of the landing site at dusk was “leading to poor lighting and a challenging imaging environment,” NASA added in the statement.
Since the landing site is in a region that is currently transitioning from prolonged dusk to a two-week-long lunar night, flat surfaces inside and near the edges of craters are likely thrown into shadows that last hours or days on end, depending on where it is located on the moon’s surface.
“As per NASA policy, all LRO data are publicly available. NASA will share any before and after flyover imagery of the area around the targeted Chandrayaan-2 Vikram Lander landing site to support analysis by the Indian Space Research Organization,” the LROC lead investigator Mark Robinson from Arizona State University, said in a statement to Inside Outer Space.
Now, just three days remain till the two-week lunar night washed over the South Polar Region where the Vikram lander and Pragyan rover currently are. While their health and status continues to elude ISRO, there will be little hope for the ground-based missions of Chandrayaan-2 to resume after the frozen lunar night comes to an end on 5 October 2019.
The Indian Space Research Organisation is expected to release a report or a statement around September 21 — when night will descend on to the Moon — on the status of the Chandrayaan-2 lander.
Isro may also then release photos of Vikram that the Chandrayaan-2 orbiter took on September 8, when the space agency said it had been able to locate the lander on the Moon.
