Too bad. Well, they accomplished quite a lot in this, their first mission to the moon, so my hat's off to them.
“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 Brozović, a radar scientist at JPL and principal investigator for the test project. “Finding LRO was relatively easy, as we were working with the mission’s navigators and had precise orbit data where it was located. Finding India’s Chandrayaan-1 required a bit more detective work because the last contact with the spacecraft was in August of 2009.”
The research, which Milliken co-authored with Shuai Li, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Hawaii and a recent Brown Ph.D. graduate, is published in Nature Geoscience.Detecting the water content of lunar volcanic deposits using orbital instruments is no easy task. Scientists use orbital spectrometers to measure the light that bounces off a planetary surface. By looking at which wavelengths of light are absorbed or reflected by the surface, scientists can get an idea of which minerals and other compounds are present.The problem is that the lunar surface heats up over the course of a day, especially at the latitudes where these pyroclastic deposits are located. That means that in addition to the light reflected from the surface, the spectrometer also ends up measuring heat."That thermally emitted radiation happens at the same wavelengths that we need to use to look for water," Milliken said. "So in order to say with any confidence that water is present, we first need to account for and remove the thermally emitted component."
To do that, Li and Milliken used laboratory-based measurements of samples returned from the Apollo missions, combined with a detailed temperature profile of the areas of interest on the Moon's surface. Using the new thermal correction, the researchers looked at data from the Moon Mineralogy Mapper, an imaging spectrometer that flew aboard India's Chandrayaan-1 lunar orbiter.The researchers found evidence of water in nearly all of the large pyroclastic deposits that had been previously mapped across the Moon's surface, including deposits near the Apollo 15 and 17 landing sites where the water-bearing glass bead samples were collected.
Thank you! Here is an updated version of that image, and a new image showing some of the last frame locations:
Phil has done a great job here in the attached imageI have a video of MIP descent without any TV graphics on it...I will share it soon...hope it will help.
This is an update to the previous image showing the locations of the last few MIP images and a projected impact site. I only show images which are available at present. I have been seeking more but without success. It is possible that MIP flew over the ridge where I suggest it crashed and struck another ridge (the 'Connecting Ridge') a moment later. The map in A shows a projection of the descent trajectory to the surface at about 89.63° S, 110.77° W, slightly over the mean limb on the farside. Alternatively MIP may have passed just above that ridge and struck the surface near 89.42° S, 134.00° W (coordinates may be revised slightly). The impact feature has not been identified.The first Artemis landing may be in this area and it is entirely possible that the first visitors in this century will find debris from MIP on the surface.
I am resurrecting this old thread to follow up on this post in the Chandrayaan 2 thread:https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=20324.msg1992673#msg1992673Astro-Neel posted some very useful video and other links, including one showing a descent video from MIP on Chandrayaan 1. The descent frames cover the last few minutes of MIP's descent, from over Malapert crater to a final image near the south pole. Note that we don't know that the last frame shown is the last frame taken (or received). I had suggested that it might lead to an improved estimate of the MIP impact point. There are two published locations for the impact, the most authoritative being the one in ISRO's report to UNOOSA after the impact, which Astro-Neel also linked to later:http://www.unoosa.org/documents/pdf/ser570E.pdf