Chandrayaan 2 was one of India’s most talked about space mission. The target was to land the rover on the southern hemisphere of the moon and gather information about that specific unexplored area.
Although the mission was a 95% success but ISRO lost contact with the lander just before the scheduled landing. Thus the rover could not be landed successfully. Still, this was an amazing achievement.
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter camera team released the first mosaic of the site around 20 days after the incident. Since then, many people downloaded that and started exploring the area in the hope of finding Vikram.
One among them, Shanmuga Subramanian, contacted the LRO project with a positive identification of debris. After receiving this tip, the LROC team confirmed the identification by comparing the before and after images.
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 meter) and lighting conditions (72° incidence angle).
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 (1.3 meter pixels, 84° incidence angle).
What led Shan to such a discovery was the challenge to do something even NASA was not successful at.
The Indian techie and blogger who is currently studying mechanical engineering shared this news in a tweet as he got a congratulatory mail from NASA itself.
@NASA has credited me for finding Vikram Lander on Moon's surface#VikramLander #Chandrayaan2@timesofindia @TimesNow @NDTV pic.twitter.com/2LLWq5UFq9
— Shan (Shanmuga Subramanian) (@Ramanean) December 2, 2019
Shan was given due credit for this amazing achievement of his. This discovery in itself speaks volumes about the perseverance and talent of this young engineer.