NASA finds spacecraft lost 8 years in lunar orbit

The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has located two unmanned spacecraft orbiting the Moon, including India's Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft that disappeared in 2009.

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NASA scientists used a new ground-based radar to detect the location of two spacecraft, one active and one "hibernating", long lost in lunar orbit, CNN reported yesterday.

"We were able to detect NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and the Indian Space Research Organization's Chandrayaan-1 in lunar orbit with ground-based radar," said Marina Brozovic, a radar scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "Finding LRO was relatively easy after we worked with the mission's locators and had precise orbital data."

Chandrayaan-1 is harder to find because the last contact with the spacecraft was in August 2009. The Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft is also quite small, only half the size of a smart car.

While interplanetary radar has been used to observe small asteroids several million kilometers from Earth, researchers are not sure if it can detect smaller objects as far away as the Moon. These objects are especially difficult to locate because the Moon has many regions with high gravity that can significantly deflect spacecraft orbits.

The new technology is crucial for future lunar missions. Optical telescopes cannot find small objects because of the bright halo around the Moon.

According to VNE