India’s Chandrayaan found by NASA Scientists

India’s first lunar probe – the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft – which was considered lost, is still orbiting the Moon, Nasa scientists have found by using a new ground-based radar technique. Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) lost communication with Chandrayaan-1 on August 29, 2009, almost a year after it was launched on October 22, 2008. Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California has successfully located the spacecraft still circling some 200 kilometres above the lunar surface.

The Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft is very small, a cube about 1.5 meters on each side – about half the size of a smart car. To find a spacecraft 380,000 kilometres away, JPL’s team used Nasa’s 70-metre antenna at Nasa’s Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex in California to send out a powerful beam of microwaves directed towards the Moon. Then the radar echoes bounced back from lunar orbit were received by the 100-meter Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia. Chandrayaan-1 was predicted to complete one orbit around the Moon every two hours and eight minutes.

Chandrayaan operated for 312 days as opposed to the intended two years but the mission achieved 95 per cent of its planned objectives. Among its many achievements, the greatest achievement was the discovery of the widespread presence of water molecules in the lunar soil.