Meet Shanmuga Subramanian, Chennai techie who found Vikram Lander on moon

A 33-year-old techie from Chennai, Shanmuga Subramanian, has achieved a rare feat by finding the debris of Indian Space Research Organisation’s Vikram Lander, which was dispatched in Chandrayaan-2. Nasa, along with announcing the discovery of the debris, gave credit to Shan and sent him an e-mail that his discovery had helped its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera team locate the site of the primary impact, as well as other debris around the impact location.

Nasa, in a tweet, confirmed the news and released images of the impact site on Moon’s surface. Both Isro and Nasa were on the lookout for the debris. 

How he found?

This image shows the Vikram Lander impact point and associated debris field. Green dots indicate spacecraft debris (confirmed or likely). Blue dots locate disturbed soil. Photo credit: Nasa

Shan, who hails from Madurai, is a mechanical engineer, blogger, app developer, and QA engineer. When he heard that even Nasa was not able to identify Vikram’s debris, he took it as a challenge.

Having some idea about the location of the landing, he took a closer look at the particular area in the images with the help of Nasa’s telemetry data. He said in a television interview that he searched the images for almost 7 to 8 hours daily for around four days.