NASA has found India’s lost spacecraft Chandrayaan-1 in orbit around the moon, a statement released by the US space agency said.
India’s first unmanned lunar expedition, Chandrayaan-1, which cost US$50 million, went missing in 2009 – a few months after its launch. According to the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), it lost contact and the ability to control the spaceship.
NASA also found its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) alongside the ISRO spacecraft. “Finding LRO was relatively easy, as we were working with the mission’s navigators and had precise orbit data where it was located. Finding Chandrayaan-1 required a bit more detective work because the last contact with the spacecraft was in August of 2009,” said Marina Brozovic, a radar scientist working on the project.
The team explained that the “radar echoes from the spacecraft were obtained seven more times over three months and are in perfect agreement with the new orbital predictions”.
Assuming that the Chandrayaan-1 was circling the moon, the NASA team planned to search for it during a specific time.
“It turns out that we needed to shift the location of Chandrayaan-1 by about 180 degrees, or half a cycle from the old orbital estimates from 2009,” said NASA’s Ryan Park. “But otherwise, Chandrayaan-1’s orbit still had the shape and alignment that we expected.”