Chandrayaan-1 still orbits the moon!
Q. Which is India's first lunar probe?- Published on 14 Mar 17a. Chandrayaan
b. Chandrayaan-1
c. Chandrayaan-2
d. MOM
ANSWER: Chandrayaan-1
India's first lunar probe - the Chandrayaan - 1 spacecraft - which was considered lost is currently orbiting the moon, according to NASA scientists who used a new ground based radar technique.
ISRO lost communication with Chandrayaan-1 on Aug 29, 2009.
It was launched on Oct 22, 2008.
Scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in CA located the spacecraft circling 200km above lunar surface.
NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and the Indian Space Research Organisation's Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft in lunar orbit have been detected with ground-based radar.
The Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft is very small, a cube about 1.5 meters on each side - about half the size of a smart car.
Although the interplanetary radar has been used to observe small asteroids several million miles from Earth, researchers were not certain that an object of this smaller size as far away as the Moon could be detected, even with the world's most powerful radars.
Chandrayaan-1 proved the perfect target for demonstrating the capability of this technique.
The Moon is riddled with mascons (regions with higher-than-average gravitational pull) that can dramatically affect a spacecraft's orbit over time, and even cause it to have crashed into the Moon.
JPL's orbital calculations indicated that Chandrayaan-1 is still circling some 200 kilometres above the lunar surface, but it was generally considered lost.
