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Chandrayaan 3: Techie who located debris in 2019 'excited', remembers Kalam
Nasa in 2019 credited Chennai's Shanmuga Subramanian for locating the debris of Vikram lander.
A month after Vikram lander hard landed on the moon's surface in 2019, Chennai's engineer Shanmuga Subramanian helped locate the debris and hit the headlines as Nasa credited him for finding Vikram lander on the moon's surface. Four years after as the world waits with bated breath for the soft landing of Vikram on Wednesday, Shanmuga is excited to watch history being made. Chandrayaan 3 moon landing: Follow LIVE updates
On Tuesday, he took to Twitter (now known as X) and remembered Abdul Kalam's contribution to Chandrayaan as he wrote, "I know tomorrow might be a historic day for India but let us remember #Kalam on whose suggestion #ISRO included Moon Impact Probe (MIP) on Chandrayaan1 which impacted close to SouthPole. #Chandrayaan3Landing will be continuation of our ISRO's efforts which started in 2008. Even after demitting his office, he was closely involved in Chandrayaan1 shows how well he was keenly interested in exploration of Space by India! The CHACE payload on MIP detected water is gaseous form near the polar regions!"
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In an interview with the Indian Express, the Chennai techie said he took a leave to watch the whole landing process. " I prepared the digital elevation models of the landing site with all the craters and mountains around… I have already processed and published images of the proposed landing site from information and photographs available in the public domain," Shanmuga Subramanian said.
In 2019 when he spotted the debris from satellite images, he did not have any fancy equipment but his laptop where he compared the old and the new images of the lunar surface -- pixel by pixel.
Chandrayaan 3 will make its attempt to soft-land on the south pole of the moon at 5.45pm on Wednesday. The landing is expected to take place at 6.04pm. In 2019, Vikram crashed into the surface of the moon minutes before the scheduled touchdown.
