NASA Wins Blind Man’s Buff with Chandrayaan-1

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On October 22, 2008, India launched the first lunar mission, Chandrayaan-1. Barely a year later on August 29, 2009, the India Space Research Organisation (ISRO,) lost all communication with Chandrayaan-1 and it was considered lost. It was released on Thursday by NASA with its new technological application, interplanetary radar found the spacecraft still orbiting the moon.

According to reports, the Chandrayaan-1 is circling about 200 kilometers above the lunar surface since 8 years. Apart from Chandrayaan-1, NASA scientists also found their own Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter circling around the Moon.

Chandrayaan-1’s original flight plan.

Marina Brozovix, a radar scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and principal investigator for the test project said: “We have been able to detect NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and the Indian Space Research Organisation’s Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft in lunar orbit with ground-based radar.”

She also said in a statement that “Finding LRO was relatively easy, as we were working with the mission’s navigators and had precise orbit data where it was located. Finding India’s Chandrayaan-1 required a bit more detective work because the last contact with the spacecraft was in August of 2009.”

It can be considered a technological challenge to find derelict spacecraft and space debris in the Earth’s orbit. But detecting these objects in the Moon’s orbit is an even bigger challenge as optical telescopes cannot detect the smaller objects hidden in the bright glare of the Moon.

But with this new technological application of interplanetary radar scientists have already discovered two lost spacecraft orbiting the moon and hope to increase the probability in future.

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