New Delhi, September 13: A NASA scientist has said that his joint experiment with ISRO to look for ice in a permanently shadowed crater near the moon’s North Pole using Chandrayaan-I had failed.
Known as bi-static experiment, it involved coordinated use of Chandrayaan-I and US space agency National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft.
Ahead of the experiment, LRO executed a minor manoeuvre to adjust its orbit to Chandrayaan-I and both spacecraft made observations of the Erlanger Crater from different angles at the same time.
However, when NASA scientists analysed the data, they found that Chandrayaan-I was not pointed to the moon when the observations were being made.
“Everything worked out as best as could be hoped, except for one thing. It turned out Chandrayaan-I was not pointed at the moon when we were taking the data, but we didn’t know that at the time,” said Paul Spudis, principal investigator for Chandrayaan-I radar instrument, Mini-SAR told science web journal ‘Universe Today’.
The experiment was conducted on August 20 and scientists were planning to make another set of observations around last month end but Chandrayaan-I lost radio contact with the ground station on August 29 forcing ISRO to bring the mission to an abrupt end. .
—Agencies