NASA spacecraft pings India’s Chandrayaan-3 lander on the moon

NASA successfully pings India's Chandrayaan-3 Lander on the moon, opening the door to precise location tracking on the lunar surface.

A NASA spacecraft has successfully pinged India’s Chandrayaan-3 lander on the moon.

According to NASA, a laser beam was transmitted and reflected between its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and the Vikram lander for the first time on the lunar surface.

The US space agency said that this successful experiment opens the door to a new style of precisely locating targets on the moon’s surface.

“At 3 p.m. EST on Dec. 12, 2023, NASA’s LRO pointed its laser altimeter instrument toward Vikram. The lander was 62 miles, or 100 kilometers, away from LRO, near Manzinus crater in the moon’s south pole region, when LRO transmitted laser pulses toward it. After the orbiter registered light that had bounced back from a tiny NASA retroreflector aboard Vikram, NASA scientists knew their technique had finally worked,” NASA stated.

NASA said that sending laser pulses toward an object and measuring how long it takes the light to bounce back is a commonly used way to track the locations of Earth-orbiting satellites from the ground.

“We’ve showed that we can locate our retroreflector on the surface from the moon’s orbit.“

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,” Xiaoli Sun, who led the team at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, that developed the retroreflector on Vikram as part of a partnership between NASA and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), said in a statement.