Bengaluru / Our own orbiter located Vikram Lander in September: ISRO chief Sivan

After Nasa said it has located Chandrayaan-2’s Vikram lander and released an image on Tuesday, Isro chief K Sivan claimed that the Indian space agency’s own orbiter had already located the lander and had declared it on its website, news agency ANI reported.

“Our own orbiter had located Vikram Lander, we had already declared that on our website, you can go back and see,” Sivan was quoted as saying.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) on Tuesday said its satellite orbiting the Moon has found Vikram lander of Chandrayaan-2 which crashed on the lunar surface in September. The US space agency also released an image showing the impact site of the lander.

However, on the Isro website an update under September 10 reads, “Vikram lander has been located by the orbiter of Chandrayaan-2, but no communication with it yet. All possible efforts are being made to establish communication with lander.”

The image taken by Nasa’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) also showed associated debris field, with parts of Vikram lander scattered over almost two dozen locations spanning several kilometers.

After Nasa released a mosaic image of the site on September 26, inviting the public to search it for signs of the lander, it said in a statement on Tuesday that Shanmuga Subramanian, a mechanical engineer and an app developer hailing from Chennai, contacted the LRO project with a positive identification of debris -- with the first piece found about 750 meters northwest of the main crash site.