NASA releases images of India’s moon lander Vikram!

NASA released two images from the moon and said that India’s moon-lander Vikram must be hiding in the shadows.

Just before we could witness Vikram Lander 12 touchdown on Moon’s surface, ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation) lost contact with it. The lander was just 2.1 km far from the surface when the communication was lost. 

Well, NASA has now shared some images and said that Vikram had a hard landing on the moon. Sharing the images on Twitter they wrote “The Chandrayaan-2 lander, Vikram, attempted a landing Sept. 7 (Sept. 6 in the United States), on a small patch of lunar highland smooth plains between Simpelius N and Manzinus C craters. Vikram had a hard landing and the precise location of the spacecraft in the lunar highlands has yet to be determined.” 

“The scene above was captured from a Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) Quickmap fly-around of the targeted landing site image width is about 150 kilometers across the centre…so far the LROC team has not been able to locate or image the lander. It was dusk when the landing area was imaged and thus large shadows covered much of the terrain; it is possible that the Vikram lander is hiding in a shadow,” they stated further.

Some new images will come forward in October as the moon orbitor will try to locate it again. With the soft landing on the moon’s surface would have made the country only the fourth – after the United States, Russia and China. Also it would have made India the first country to complete a soft landing near the South Pole on its first attempt.