Right from the day, ISRO lost control to Vikram Lander of Chandrayaan 2, NASA has been making many unsuccessful attempts to find the Vikram Lander debris on the moon until a Chennai Techie spotted it.
Shanmuga Subramanian, an IT engineer from Chennai guided NASA by scanning images from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbital (LRO) Camera that the US space agency had released to the public.
“I got hooked and started comparing Nasa’s picture to previous ones every night for some 4-5 days,” he said.
The US space agency made the announcement today, releasing an image taken by its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) that showed the site of the spacecraft’s impact (September 6 in India and September 7 in the US).
“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,” NASA said in a statement.
“I had a side-by-side comparison of those two images on two of my laptops… on one side there was the old image, and another side there was the new image released by NASA,” he told news agency AFP, adding he was helped by fellow Twitter and Reddit users.
“It was quite hard, but (I) spent some effort,” said the 33-year-old.
NASA then made additional research and released the statement on Tuesday.
@NASA has credited me for finding Vikram Lander on Moon’s surface#VikramLander #Chandrayaan2@timesofindia @TimesNow @NDTV pic.twitter.com/2LLWq5UFq9
— Shan (@Ramanean) December 2, 2019
“I narrowed my search to 2 square kilometres. I used only a laptop and searched all the images”, he said.
