Cool.
(CNN)It made history as India’s first unmanned lunar spacecraft. Then it vanished.
Nearly a decade later, NASA has located two unmanned spacecraft orbiting the moon, including India’s Chandrayaan-1, which went quiet in 2009.Scientists used a new ground radar to locate the two spacecraft — one active and one dormant, NASA said Thursday.“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, a radar scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.“Finding LRO was relatively easy, as we were working with the mission’s navigators and had precise orbit data where it was located.”
The Chandrayaan-1 was more of a challenge because the last contact with the spacecraft was in August 2009.
0 Comments