Chandrayaan-II mission

[selvaarchi]

"NASA lunar orbiter to image Chandrayaan-2 landing site"

Anyone know if NASA located it? (highlighted text mine)

https://spaceflightnow.com/2019/09/1...ite-next-week/

NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will try to locate India’s Vikram lander on the moon during a flyover of the landing site Tuesday. Indian space officials said they found the disabled spacecraft on the moon using the country’s own Chandrayaan 2 orbiter, but declined to release any images.

LRO’s high-resolution camera has taken aerial images of the Apollo landing sites with enough clarity to resolve the astronauts’ footprints left on the moon more than 40 years earlier. The NASA orbiter’s camera has also imaged China’s Chang’e 3 and Chang’e 4 landers on the moon, and located the crash site of the Israeli Beresheet spacecraft earlier this year.

Noah Petro, LRO’s project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said that the orbiter is due to fly over the Vikram landing site Tuesday, Sept. 17.

[selvaarchi]

Anyone know if NASA located it? (highlighted text mine)

Got the answer. Due to poor lighting conditions - NO. Will try again on October 14th.

https://www.leonarddavid.com/indias-...yaan-2-lander/

Flying over the touchdown zone on September 17, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) did take new imagery in an attempt to spot the lander. NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) is a system of three cameras mounted on the LRO that capture high resolution photos of the lunar landscape. However, due to poor lighting conditions, chances of locating the lander were unfavorable.

LRO will next fly over the landing site on October 14th – enjoying a more favorable lighting situation.

[selvaarchi]

"India's 2nd lunar mission orbiter detects charged particles on Moon"

http://www.moondaily.com/reports/Ind..._Moon_999.html

Even though India's second Lunar Mission, Chandrayaan-2, failed to soft-land on the surface of the Moon, the country's space agency, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) was able to save the Orbiter, which will still rove around the satellite for seven years, collecting data on the lunar surface and atmosphere.

Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) had launched the mission, Chandrayaan-2, on 7 September, but suffered a setback after the lander Vikram lost contact with Earth, during its attempt to touch down on the lunar surface, minutes before the scheduled time.

The national space agency said on Thursday that the rover continues to study the properties of the Sun and characteristics of the solar system. The ISRO said the payload on the Orbiter in its first few days, could detect charged particles and their intensity variations during its first passage through the long tail (geotail) of Earth's magnetosphere

[selvaarchi]

"CHANDRAYAAN 2 ORBITER CATCHES SOLAR FLARE IN THE ACT, GEARS UP TO WATCH THE MOON'S SURFACE REACT"

https://www.firstpost.com/tech/scien...t-7481291.html

The Indian Space Research Organisation's (ISRO's) Chandrayaan 2 orbiter has got its first taste of a solar flare — an important requirement for the spacecraft to study what the Moon's surface is made up of. Essentially, high energy radiation from the Sun helps "illuminate" the lunar surface, allowing the orbiter's instruments to gather additional data on the composition of the Moon's surface elements. ISRO has shared data that the orbiter's Solar X-ray Monitor collected on the flare.

[selvaarchi]

"Check Out Some Of The ‘Sharpest Images Ever’ Of The Moon Taken By India’s Lunar Orbiter"

https://www.forbes.com/sites/robinan.../#41b0ce29640c

India’s latest mission to the moon is doing some rather fantastic science right now. No, not the Vikram lander: lest we forget, that made a hard landing in the moon’s south polar region at the beginning of September; its remains cannot yet be located by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO).

No, I’m talking about the orbiter the Chandrayaan-2 mission successfully deployed before the lander and its rover made its doomed descent.

According to a recent press release from the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), all of the orbiter’s instruments are operating as planned, from the camera designed to create 3D maps of its surface to the X-ray sleuth that’s keeping an eye on the Sun’s outbursts and its ghostly corona.

[selvaarchi]

"Chandrayaan-II: First illuminated image of the lunar surface released by Isro"

https://www.hindustantimes.com/india...WLvf1r5QK.html

Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) released the first illuminated image of the lunar surface acquired by Chandrayaan 2 on Thursday. The image was taken by the lunar mission’s high resolution Imaging IR Spectrometer (IIRS) payload designed to measure the solar radiation reflected off the moon’s surface in 256 contiguous spectral bands from 100 km lunar orbit.

The image shows several craters including Sommerfield, Kirkwood and Stebbins on the northern hemisphere of earth’s only satellite. The craters are seen lit by the reflected sunlight.

IIRS has been employed by Isro to better understand the origin and evolution of the Moon through mapping of the lunar surface.

[selvaarchi]

"No trace of Chandrayaan-2 Vikram lander: NASA"

https://www.deccanherald.com/interna...sa-770433.html

NASA has found no evidence of Chandrayaan-2’s Vikram lander in the images captured during a latest flyby of its Moon orbiter of the lunar region where India's ambitious mission attempted a soft landing, the US space agency said.

[selvaarchi]

"ISRO Releases New Images Captured By Chandrayaan-2 Orbiter"

https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/isro...rbiter-2121867

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has released a new set of images of the surface of the Moon. The images, showing impact craters on the Moon surface, were captured by the Dual Frequency-Synthetic Aperture Radar (DF-SAR) on its Chandrayaan-2 Orbiter, the space agency said in a post on Twitter.

According to ISRO, the Moon has been continuously bombarded by meteorites, asteroids and comets since its formation. This has resulted in the formation of innumerable impact craters that form the most distinct geographic features on its surface.

[selvaarchi]

"Chandrayaan-2 sends data on Argon-40 isotope"

https://www.hindustantimes.com/india...78QlfRzYL.html

One of the eight payloads aboard Chandrayaan 2 orbiter, the Chandra’s Atmospheric Composition Explorer-2 (CHACE-2), has sent back data on the variations in the concentration of Argon in the thin gaseous atmosphere around the moon called lunar exosphere.

Argon-40, which is one of the isotopes of the noble gas, is an important constituent of this exosphere. It originates from the radioactive disintegration of Potassium-40.

The radioactive potassium 40 that is present deep below the lunar surface disintegrates to 40Ar, which, in turn, diffuses through seepages and faults and makes its way up to the lunar exosphere.

Chace-2, which is a neutral mass spectrometer, has detected day-night variations of the concentration of Argon-40. The element being a condensable gas at the temperatures and pressures that prevail on the lunar surface condenses during the lunar night. After lunar dawn, it starts getting released to the lunar exosphere again increasing the concentrations.

[selvaarchi]

"SRO to attempt second soft landing soon, says chief K Sivan"

https://www.livemint.com/science/new...678130008.html

"On technology side, we could not succeed in completing a soft landing, but all systems of the mission, functioned well till about 300 metres from the moon surface. Despite failures, ISRO has the desire to succeed. Chandrayaan-2 is not the end of story," said the ISRO Chief.

Highlighting ISRO’s future projects, Sivan said scientists were working on some advanced satellite missions. "Our projects on solar mission and historic human spaceflight mission are on track. The Small satellite launch vehicle (SSLV) is ready to make its maiden flight early next year," he said.

The space agency is also working on connecting Navik Signals to cellphones to develop several related applications needs. The testing of 200 tonne semi-cryogenic engine, to power ISRO's Reusable Launch Vehicle, is also expected to begin soon.

[selvaarchi]

"New details emerge about failed lunar landings"

https://spacenews.com/new-details-em...unar-landings/

The Indian government has offered new details about what happened during its first attempt to land on the moon in September.

In a written response to questions Nov. 20 to the Lok Sabha, the lower house of India’s Parliament, Jitendra Singh, minister of state for the Department of Space, said that the Vikram lander “hard landed” on the moon Sept. 6 because of a problem with the lander’s braking thrusters.

“The first phase of descent was performed nominally from an altitude of 30 km to 7.4 km above the moon surface,” he wrote. The lander slowed from 1,683 meters per second to 146 meters per second during that time.

“During the second phase of descent, the reduction in velocity was more than the designed value,” he continued. “Due to this deviation, the initial conditions at the start of the fine braking phase were beyond the designed parameters.”

“As a result, Vikram hard landed within 500 m of the designated landing site,” he concluded. Singh’s statement did not elaborate on that caused that “deviation” in the performance.

That statement is the first formal acknowledgment by the Indian government that the lander crashed during its landing attempt. The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), part of the Department of Space, made few statements about the fate of the lander since the Sept. 6 landing, and in them referred to only a loss of communications with the lander, not a failed landing.

[CJSF]

"New details emerge about failed lunar landings"

https://spacenews.com/new-details-em...unar-landings/

Am I misreading this, or are they saying the lander crashed because it slowed down too much?

CJSF

[selvaarchi]

Am I misreading this, or are they saying the lander crashed because it slowed down too much?

CJSF

That was how i read it too and accelerated due to moons gravity when it ran out of fuel.

[selvaarchi]

"NASA credits Indian engineer for finding first crash piece of Chandrayaan 2’s Vikram lander"

https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/in...le30146076.ece

Images of the lunar surface just released by NASA confirm that the Indian lunar lander Vikram broke into pieces on crashlanding on September 7. Its debris was strewn across at least 750 metres of the crash site — which itself was off the landing target.

The U.S. space agency also credited Indian engineer Shanmuga Subramanian with first finding the debris from the Chandrayaan-2 mission’s lander.

In the images, NASA’s team tentatively identifies about 20 points with debris and a few spots where the lunar ‘soil’ or regolith was disturbed on its impact.