NASA's Lunarraft LRO will take pictures of Vikram's lander today. India News



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NEW DELHI: The US space agency Nasa will try to take pictures of Vikram Lander, motionless on Moon's surface, with the help of his Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) on Tuesday. The American lunar ship, which bypasses Moon since 2009, will fly over the site of the lander.
The LRO images will help the Indian Space Research Organization (Isro) to know the exact status of the Chandrayaan-2 Lander and will help the Indian agency in its efforts to make contact with it. Vikram had "landed" on Moon's South Pole on September 7 during the last 15-minute run. LRO was also close enough to Vikram's landing attempt to collect maneuver data using his lyman-alpha mapping project instrument, according to space.com.
Reacting to a report that the NASA rat operations officer would take the image of the Vikram Lander, the PMO tweeted, "Remember the ISRO spirit".
In addition to using LRO, NASA uses the ground stations of its space network to send greetings to Vikram Lander. "Yes, NASA / JPL is trying to contact Vikram via its deep space network (DSN) as contractually agreed with Isro," confirmed a NASA source at TOI.
At the same time, two foreign astronomers monitoring the orbiter claimed that its altitude had been reduced to about 90 km from the 100 km circular orbit. Edgar Kaiser, astronomer, tweeted: "The photo on the left (representing a graph) shows the 90 km of Chandrayaan_2 orbiting the current full moon. Note how close the path is to the surface in relation to the diameter of the moon. In a week, we will have the right image. Obviously, this orbit was chosen to keep the probe in constant sunlight. "
Another astronomer, Scott Tilley, famous for having discovered a NASA spy satellite that had been lost in space in 2005, also tweeted:. "Repeated attempts by TOI to contact the Isro president's office to find out the altitude of the orbiter failed.
LRO is equipped with a high-resolution camera that allows it to take aerial images of Apollo landing sites with enough clarity to locate astronaut footprints dating back four decades. The same camera will be used Tuesday to try to capture Vikram images. The LRO is mapping Moon and looking for resources that could be useful for future crewed missions.
Previously, Isro had used NASA's far-flung space network to follow the path of the Chandrayaan-2 integrated module as it was heading towards Moon from the Earth's elliptical orbit. Nasa's JPL network has a DSN ground station in three locations: Goldstone, Southern California (USA), Madrid (Spain) and Canberra (Australia). The three stations are located 120 degrees from each other on Earth to allow any distant space satellite to communicate with at least one station at any time.

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