from the might-want-to-keep-an-eye-on-Tycho,-too dept.
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
What exactly happened to India's moon lander? During descent to the lunar surface on Sept. 6, the Vikram lander lost contact with Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) mission control and its ultimate fate remains something of a mystery. However, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) will fly over Vikram's landing site near the moon's south pole Tuesday and could give us the first look at Vikram's lunar resting place.
[...]The camera on LRO has three different imagers, enabling it to ogle the moon's surface with exceptional clarity. One wide angle camera and two black-and-white cameras will beam back images to Earth after the pass. NASA releases LRO images publicly with huge multi-terabyte data sets dropping every month at the Planetary Data System.
"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," LRO project lead Noah Petro told Spaceflight Now on Thursday.
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NASA (USA's National Aeronautics and Space Administration) reports that India's Vikram Lander has been Found:
The Chandrayaan 2 Vikram lander was targeted for a highland smooth plain about 600 kilometers from the south pole; unfortunately the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) lost contact with their lander shortly before the scheduled touchdown (Sept. 7 in India, Sept. 6 in the United States). Despite the loss, getting that close to the surface was an amazing achievement. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera team released the first mosaic (acquired Sept. 17) of the site on Sept. 26 and many people have downloaded the mosaic to search for signs of Vikram. Shanmuga Subramanian contacted the LRO project with a positive identification of debris. After receiving this tip, the LROC team confirmed the identification by comparing before and after images. When the images for the first mosaic were acquired the impact point was poorly illuminated and thus not easily identifiable. Two subsequent image sequences were acquired on Oct. 14 and 15, and Nov. 11. 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). The November mosaic shows best the impact crater, ray and extensive debris field. The three largest pieces of debris are each about 2x2 pixels and cast a one pixel shadow.
See the NASA article for before/after pictures of the impact site.
Previously:
NASA Lunar Probe Will Help Search for India's Lost Moon Lander
Time is Running Out for India to Establish Contact With its Lunar Lander
India Locates Lander Lost on Final Approach to Moon
Chandrayaan-2: India's Vikram Lander Presumed to Have Crashed
Chandrayaan-2 Updates: Lunar Orbit Insertion and Lunar Orbit Maneuver
Chandrayaan-2 Launch: How to Watch First Mission to the Moon's South Pole Mon 20190722 @ 0913 UTC
Scrubbed Chandrayaan 2 Mission to Moon's South Pole to Launch on Mon July 22 0913 UTC
India's Lunar Spacecraft Launches Sunday on First-Ever Mission to Moon's South Pole
India to Launch Combined Orbiter/Lander/Rover Mission
India's Chandrayaan-2 Moon Mission Planned for 2018
(Score: -1, Troll) by VLM on Wednesday September 18 2019, @11:35AM (2 children)
Driving around aimlessly looking for its pre-programmed designated shitting street. Some dude named "Bob" from tech support is on the phone asking if they can reinstall windows on it or else they need to hang up and save the company money on support call labor. Publishers have been propagandizing for years that the "international" $5 textbooks they sell in India are not quite as good as the supposedly identical $200 textbooks they sell in the USA so we should gladly pay the extra $195 for the almost same book; well, I guess our engineering textbooks really ARE better than the India import texts because our spaceships (mostly) don't crash.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday September 18 2019, @05:34PM (1 child)
Once again demonstrating that this is DEFINITELY no longer a science and technology oriented forum.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday September 20 2019, @11:41AM
Shitposting about bad automobile (lunar rover, whatever...) analogies and crappy outsourced Indian IT support is an unavoidable tradition, and combine it with "spaceships spaceships spaceships" and here we are.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Wednesday September 18 2019, @05:30PM
not a whole lot else to add, just would have thought that the second this happened they'd have started calculating when LRO would pass overhead and/or what it would take to maneuver it there. (Although IIRC it eventually gets everywhere over the surface without maneuvering....)
This sig for rent.