Shanmuga Subramaniam, a Chennai techie has helped NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO)Team to identify the debris and the crashed site of ISRO’s Vikram Lander which went missing on September 7.
How was the debris spot and the lander found?
NASA’s pictures of Vikram’s impact site which was taken during the spacecraft’s overhead pass, first taken by NASA on 17 September and released on 26 September was compared with the previous pictures.
Subramanian studied the details in these pictures closely. He said to Al Jazeera ‘that after five nights of searching NASA’s lunar images pixel-by-pixel, and with some help from his Twitter followers, he positively identified a piece of the spacecraft’. Subramanian emailed NASA’s LRO team with his identification of the debris field.
“Though there were a lot of false positives, I found a tiny little dot and compared with previous LRO images up to the last 9 years, which eventually confirmed it would be the debris. Then I reached out (to) NASA,” Subramanian told Al Jazeera.
“I had side-by-side comparison of those two images on two of my laptops… on one side there was the old image, and another side there was the new image released by NASA,” he told news agency AFP
Who is this Shanmuga Subramaniam?
Shanmuga Subramaniam is a 33 year old Mechanical Engineer and App Developer in Chennai. He discovered Vikram Lander’s crash site and debris and posted about it on October3rd and November 17th, 2019 via Twitter. He said that his deep interest towards space and the challenge that lay in finding the missing lander prompted him to go for it. He credited that he was helped by fellow Twitter and Reddit users.
His outstanding discovery has been acknowledged by NASA and the global media. John Keller, Deputy Project Scientist, LRO, Goddard Space Flight Center sent an acknowledgement mail to Subramaniam, stating that since they had to ensure.