New Delhi: In contraction to the claim made by 33-year-old mechanical engineer and space enthusiast from Chennai, Shanmuga Subramanian, ISRO Chief Dr K Sivan has said that the space agency’s own orbiter located the lander of Chandrayaan 2.
It may be recalled that the US space agency NASA credited the Chennai-based engineer for alerting about the presence of the debris of the lander Vikram on the lunar surface, on Tuesday.
Responding to the same, Dr Sivan said: “We don’t want to tell anything on this one. After the landing date itself, our website had given that our. We have already declared that on our website. You can go back and see…Our own orbiter has located the site of the lander.”
The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) had lost contact with the lander Vikram following its launch from Chandraayan-2 moon orbiter on September 6 when it tried to make soft-landing near the moon’s south pole. On September 10, ISRO had put out a statement on its website saying lander Vikram has been located on the moon’s surface by the lunar orbiter but that there has been no communication with it yet. The agency said “all possible efforts were being made to re-establish contact”.

Dr Sivan had earlier said that Vikram had made a “hard landing” and said the orbiter had managed to take thermal images of the lander.
Meanwhile, on Tuesday Shanmuga Subramanian hit the headlines with his claim that he alerted both ISRO and NASA about the presence of the lander’s debris and that the NASA responded to him.
“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,” NASA said in a statement on Tuesday.
A successful soft-landing on the moon’s surface would have made the country only the fourth – after the United States, Russia and China – to achieve the feat.

(inputs from ANI)