The intact Indian rover Pragyan crashed into the moon’s chest, evidence found in NASA Pictures

Sraboni Modak
2 min readOct 11, 2020

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The intact Indian rover Pragyan crashed into the moon’s chest, evidence found in NASA Pictures

India’s rover ‘Pragyan’ is intact on the moon. Although the second luner mission unseccessful at the last minute, Chennai-based technologist Shanmuga Subramanian shared this information with ISRO after analysing images recently sent by NASA.

Analysing images of the moon sent by NASA last year, Shanmuga first saw the wreckage of the wrecked Indian Spacecraft Vikram. After seeing some new pictures sent by NASA in May, Shanmuga identified the existence of the intact rover ‘Pragyan’ in the wreckage.

Not only that, he also claimed that in a letter to ISRO that the rover had moved a few meters away from the initial position.

“Chandrayaan-2’s Pragyan “ROVER” intact on Moon’s surface & has rolled out few meters from the skeleton Vikram lander whoose payloads got disintegrated due to rough landing”,said Shanmuga Subramanian.

ISRO chairman K. Shivan told the Times of India that he had received the letter from Shanmuga. K. Shivan also expressed that “NASA has not yet commented on the matter. However, the first person who first identified the wreckage of Vikram has sent an email. The matter is being looked by our experts and nothing can be said about it at the moment”.

“We have received communication from him. Our experts analysing the same”, told K. Sivan, the chairman of Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).

Vikram’s wreckage can be seen in a photo sent by NASA’s Luner Orbiter in November 2019. However, Shanmuga claimed that the rover was not seen at that time because the polar region of the moon was not bright enough and it was lying in a hole 2 meters below the back of the moon. Later, when NASA released the picture taken in January, he can recognise ‘Pragyan’ by looking at it.

According to Subramanian, It appears the orders were send to the lander indiscriminately for a considerable length of time and there is a particular chance that the lander could have gotten orders and handed-off it to the Rover…but the lander couldn’t convey it back to the Earth.

Latest photos from LRO (January 4, 2020) showed rover tracks on the moon from the lander.

He said the debris he had discovered before may be from one of the payloads. The debris found by NASA may be of different payloads, communicating reception apparatus and thrusters. In any case, he said that no one but ISRO could give precise data and explaination in such manner.

Originally published at https://www.abstractwords.com.

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Sraboni Modak

Interested in Science, Technology and curious about recent activities.