NASA Spots Lost Indian Lunar Orbiter
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has just announced its discovery of the location of India's first lunar orbiter, the Chandrayaan-1. The lunar orbiter has been lost to India in 2009 when the orbiter has stopped responding to ground stations more than eight years ago.
The Chandrayaan-1, as far as spacecraft measurements go, is a small object roughly cubic in shape and measuring five feet on all sides, according to a short coverage by Engadget. A new radar technique developed by NASA was finally able to successfully locate the dormant spacecraft as it orbits the moon. The new technique was also able to spot NASA's own, still functioning Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO).
According to Marina Brozovic, radar scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), they used ground-based instruments to achieve the feat. "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 via a news post by the JPL. "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," she continued.
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Locating the Chandrayaan-1 is a convincing demonstration of the new technique — before this, researches are not very sure that an object of that size can be detected as far away as the lunar orbit. The lost satellite, it turns out, made for a perfect target for testing the capability of the new radar techniques.
The achievement is made even greater by the fact that very little is known about the lost spacecraft's current orbit, according to The Register. It's not a simple task to simply extrapolate the orbiter's orbit from data all the way from 2009, also, NASA explains that the moon is "riddled with mascons (regions with higher-than-average gravitational pull) that can dramatically affect a spacecraft's orbit over time."
