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NASA Finds Lunar Spacecraft That Vanished 8 Years Ago (cnn.com)
An anonymous reader shares a CNN report: It made history as India's first unmanned lunar spacecraft. Then it vanished. Nearly a decade later, NASA has located two unmanned spacecraft orbiting the moon, including India's Chandrayaan-1, which went quiet in 2009. Scientists used a new ground radar to locate the two spacecraft -- one active and one dormant, NASA said Thursday. "We have been able to detect NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter [LRO] and the Indian Space Research Organization's Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft 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, as we were working with the mission's navigators and had precise orbit data where it was located."
I need to find a satellite the launch team stood up in 2009. Can you please send me the commands to find the satellite and restore communication with it. This mission is most needful!
Your greatest help is mostly appreciated!!!
Given the distance involved and the size of the sattelites, this is some pretty impressive work.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
Feeding a troll but to put this into perspective they located a satellite last seen in 2009 by basically sending a signal into space and catching it's echo... all while that satellite is rotating around another giant satellite that is rotating around us...
Let's pretend that you know the old rotation...
Forget what amazing technology radar is and how even decently catching the reflection of sun off the moon in a camera is difficult...
Forget about the problems of all the other stuff that can bounce the signal back... forget that in 8 years the orbit could have changed so significantly you might not even know when the satellite will be eclipsed by the moon!! Also, the moon is only over the horizon for as long as the sun so you have 8 to~14 hours of time then the moon isn't eclipsing the satellite where a particular ground station could even hit the satellite with a signal.
The moon is 384,400 km away and orbits the earth at a speed of 3,683 km/h! It takes ~1.3 seconds for the signal to make it roughly to the moon and ~1.3 seconds to make it back! in that time the moon (and things orbiting it) have moved over a kilometer in relation to the earth!!! That's just in the time it took the radar signal to reach! Another kilometer for the return signal!
They sent the signal from one ground station and received a reflection of that signal on another, were able to correlate the exact time the signal was sent vs. when it was received, compare it with the location of other signal reflections, figure out where to point a telescope and verify this tiny little thing the size of a smart car is in fact Chandrayaan-1.
120 characters ought to be enough for anyone
And it wants to be known as "The Excession"...
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
Good thing they were unmanned. I would hate to think we forgot about someone up there.