NASA locates India's 'lost' Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft

Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft is India's first lunar probe and it was believed to have been lost because Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) lost contact with it on August 29, 2009, almost a year after it was launched on October 22, 2008.
Scientists of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California have discovered that it is not lost but still circling nearly 200-Km above the surface of the Moon. NASA has located it by using a new ground-based radar technique.
This has been reported in thestatesman.com dated 10 March 2017.

NASA was searching for its own LRO and it was quite easy because they were working in league with the mission's navigators and had precise orbit data where it was located. However, finding Chandrayaan-1 required a bit more detective work. This was because o its size - it is a very small cube about 1.5 meters on each side and is about half the size of a smart car. Finding such a tiny object was a challenge.
The JPL team used NASA's 70-metre antenna at NASA's Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex in California to send out a powerful beam of microwaves directed towards the Moon. The radar echoes bounced back from lunar orbit were then received by the 100-meter Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia. That is how the lost Chandrayaan-1 was found 380,000 kilometres away.


Image courtesy wikimediacommons.org

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