ISRO To Make A Formal Announcement About The Fate Of Chandrayaan 2's Moon Lander

The fate of Vikram, the moon lander of the Chandrayaan 2, has been sealed. What happened was that it crash-landed on the Moon surface due to a problem with its braking rockets.

This piece of news was uncovered by the minister of state for the Department of Space Jitendra Singh in response to the Indian Parliament’s lower house Lok Sabha.

According to Singh. The first phase of descending happened as planned from 30 km to 7.4 km from the surface of the Moon. The craft, in the meantime, reduced the speed from 1,683 meters per second to 146 m per second.

Issues occurred during the second phase of descending. The velocity reduction exceeded the designed values, causing the Vikram to hand landed 500 m from the pre-calculated spot.

On the 10^th of September, ISRO announced that they had been able to locate the Vikram lander with the Chandrayaan 2’ orbiter. However, they could not communicate with it, and they were trying their best to make communication with the lander.

According to ISRO, the delay in announcing what happened to the lander is due to their attempt to figure out what caused the hard land. The agency’s engineers were trying to reconstruct the scene to find the reason, and they had to wait for the results from them to be able to make a formal announcement.

However, while the agency delayed the announcement, they had good reason to believe that the lander hit the surface at such a fast speed that it was unable to survive.