ISRO's Vikram lander, Chandrayaan-3 gets pinged by retroreflector from NASA spacecraft
Chandrayaan-3 mission, the US space agency said, on January 24. "We've showed that we can locate our retroreflector on the surface from the Moon's orbit," said Xiaoli Sun, who led the team at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, that developed the retroreflector on Vikram as part of a partnership between NASA and Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), as reported by PTI.
Also Read | NASA restores communication with mini-helicopter on Mars "The next step is to improve the technique so that it can become routine for missions that want to use these retroreflectors in the future," Sun said in a NASA statement, the report added. NASA announced that a laser beam was emitted and bounced back and forth between the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and a device on the Vikram lander, roughly the size of an Oreo.
This breakthrough paves the way for a novel method of accurately pinpointing targets on the lunar surface. The lander was at a distance of 100 kilometers from LRO, close to Manzinus crater in the Moon's south pole region, when LRO transmitted laser pulses toward it on December 12 last year.
Upon detecting reflected light from a small NASA retroreflector on Vikram, the orbiter confirmed the success of NASA's technique. The conventional method of sending laser pulses towards an object and gauging the time taken for the light to return is frequently employed for tracking Earth-orbiting satellites from the ground.
Scientists emphasized that employing this technique in reverse, where laser pulses are transmitted from a mobile spacecraft to a stationary one for determining its exact location, holds numerous applications on the Moon. Measuring a mere 2 inches or 5 centimeters in width, NASA's compact yet robust
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