Shanmuga Subramanian, Indian who helped to locate Chandrayaan-2 lander

A Chennai
engineer has helped American space agency NASA to find pieces of Vikram lander
on moon’s surface.

NASA’s Lunar
Reconnaissance Orbiter (LROC) mission of Goddard Space Flight Centre has
credited Shanmuga Subramanian, a mechanical engineer in India, for the
discovery in an official email.

“Thank you for informing us of your discovery of debris from the Vikram lander. The LROC team confirmed that the location does exhibit changes in images taken before and after the date of the landing” John Keller, Deputy Project Scientist, LROC, said.

Using this information the LROC team did additional searches in the area and located the site of the primary impact as well as other debris around the impact location and has announced the sighting on the NASA and ASU pages where you have been given credit for you observation,” John Keller added.

Vikram was
part of India’s Chandrayaan-2 mission to the moon, which launched in July.

If the
spacecraft had reached the surface in one piece on September 7, India would
have been only the fourth country to successfully put a lander on the
moon. 

Subramanian
had contacted NASA in October, but it took time for the American space agency
to be certain of its interpretation of the observation as well as making sure
that all the stakeholders had an opportunity to comment before they would
announce the results.

Subramanian
told sources that he was happy that his work got the due recognition.