Indian moon lander Vikram may have most likely crashed on the moon because the navigation control and guidance mechanism in the penultimate phase was not designed to handle the large spike in speed that developed in the last 3-5 minutes of its descent.
This problem has been corrected in the new modules of Chandrayaan-3 which is due to be sent around the end of this year.
ISRO Chairman K. Sivan, facing questions directly for the first time since the landing mission failed three months back, said, “We are looking at all navigation guidance and control aspects. We learnt from telemetry data that the design could not take the large difference in velocity. We have learnt our lessons from the failure.” ISRO’s internal failure analysis committee has evaluated the debacle.He also denied that Chandrayaan-2 was launched in a hurry without doing thorough tests, or that it had delayed other projects due in 2019. Any delayed satellite launches were due to late availability of hardware or components.
Published - January 01, 2020 10:38 pm IST
