NEWS ISRO SIVAN LANDER VIKRAM
BENGALURU: After the tense moments, big relief. Vikram, the lunar lander of Chandrayaan 2 space mission by ISRO, has been located on the moon’s surface and the ground station is working to establish contact, ISRO chief K Sivan said on Monday, after a day’s high suspense over its fate.
In what had come as a shock, ISRO had lost contact with Vikram in the small hours of Saturday, around 1.30am, when everything appeared going as per schedule, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi was among the ISRO scientists watching the landing of the Space mission on the Moon. The lander stopped sending pictures some 2km from the lunar surface, causing jitters at ISRO earth monitoring station here.
Sivan, who broke down at the height of an emotional stress before PM Modi, stated on Sunday that ISRO was trying to re-establish contact with the lander Vikram, while the rover that it carried is functioning normally and orbiting the Moon and conducting studies to be relayed to ISRO station.
The orbiter has taken a thermal image of the lander.” It must have been a hard landing for Vikram, instead of the envisaged soft-landing,” Sivan was quoted as saying. There was no clarity if the lander was damaged. Rectifications can be attempted at from the ground station in the present tw-week time. –IHN-NN
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