NASA lunar probe to fly over landing site tomorrow, may shed new light on Vikram lander
NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) is also likely to release the images that it takes of the lander, the US media reported.
“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 Organisation,” quoted Noah Petro, the LRO’s project scientist, as saying.
The team was gathered in a conference room last week, about 35 in all, ready to celebrate India's triumph: the country's first lunar landing. Like many watching the livestream broadcast from the control center in Bengaluru half a world away, John Thornton, the chief executive of Astrobotic, a Pittsburgh company that is developing a moon lander of its own, was confident India would stick it, setting off celebrations across the world.
NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) is also likely to release the images that it takes of the lander, the US media reported.
“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 Organisation,” spaceflightnow.com quoted Noah Petro, the LRO’s project scientist, as saying.
The team was gathered in a conference room last week, about 35 in all, ready to celebrate India's triumph: the country's first lunar landing. Like many watching the livestream broadcast from the control center in Bengaluru half a world away, John Thornton, the chief executive of Astrobotic, a Pittsburgh company that is developing a moon lander of its own, was confident India would stick it, setting off celebrations across the world.
Chandrayaan 2, comprising an orbiter, a lander and a rover, journeyed from earth for eight days and reached the moon’s vicinity on August 20. On September 2, the lander riding on the orbiter was separated and got into a closer orbit around the moon, moving pole-to-pole at a distance of 35 km x 100 km.
Mission planners at ISRO had divided the last critical 15-minute parabolic descent into four smaller phases. At 1.38 a.m. IST on September 7, the lander perfectly cleared the ‘rough braking phase’, swooping down from 30 km to 7.4 km of the lunar surface in 10 minutes. Its velocity had dropped as required from 1,640 metres a second to about 400 metres a second.
It had now entered the second part, the ‘fine braking phase’ of 3 minutes, with the four throttleable motors switching off to further lower the velocity. It had to re-orient itself, take pictures of the landing site to look for hazards like slopes and rocks. The moon was just over 2 minutes and 2.1 km away. But by then, at the command headquarters in Bengaluru, the green lines on the screens showed that it had strayed from its path; mission managers said they were not receiving any signal from the lander.
