Chandrayaan-1 was India’s first mission to Moon, but lost communication with Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) in 2009
NASA has found India’s lost spacecraft Chandrayaan-1 after it went lost more than seven years ago. NASA applied its new technological application of interplanetary radar pioneered by its scientists at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, to locate two spacecraft orbiting the moon – one active, and one dormant.
“We have been able to detect NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter [LRO] and the Indian Space Research Organization’s Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft in lunar orbit with ground-based radar,” said Marina Brozovic, a radar scientist at JPL and principal investigator for the test project.
“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,” Brozovic said in a news media statement on Thursday.
Chandrayaan-1 was India’s first mission to Moon. The Indian government approved ISRO’s proposal for the first Indian Moon Mission in November 2003. It was successfully launched in October, 2008. The spacecraft carried 11 scientific instruments built in US, India, UK, Germany, Sweden and Bulgaria. The satellite made more than 3400 orbits around the moon but then ISRO lost its communication with the spacecraft in August 2009.
“It turns out that we needed to shift the location of Chandrayaan-1 by about 180 degrees, or half a cycle from the old orbital estimates from 2009,” said Ryan Park, the manager of JPL’s Solar System Dynamics group, who delivered the new orbit back to the radar team. “But otherwise, Chandrayaan-1’s orbit still had the shape and alignment that we expected.”
NASA said that ground-based radars could possibly play a part in future robotic and human missions to the moon.