As Chennai-based engineer, Shanmuga Subramanian, helped NASA find the debris of Chandrayaan-2 (-0.61 m) lander Vikram on Tuesday, Indian Premier League (IPL) franchise Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB) came up with a hilarious tweet for the “NASA team.” Referring to all the cricket balls hit out of the park by their premier batsmen AB de Villiers and Virat Kohli, RCB tweeted, “Could the #NASA team that found #VikramLander also help us find the cricket balls hit by ABD & Virat.”
Could the #NASA team that found #VikramLander also help us find the cricket balls hit by ABD & Virat 👀?
— Royal Challengers (@RCBTweets) December 3, 2019
After the Vikram Lander was located, NASA in a statement credited the Indian engineer and said, “the debris first located by Shanmuga Subramanian about 750 meters northwest of the main crash site and was a single bright pixel identification in that first mosaic.”
The Bengaluru franchise had earlier posted a congratulatory tweet for ISRO after the successful launch of Chandrayaan2. “Congratulations @isro. Watching #Chandrayan2 take off was a fantastic sight! P.S. We have a special request for you, on behalf of our batsmen,” RCB tweeted.
Subramanian, a 33-year-old IT professional, whose Twitter bio now reads, “I found Vikram Lander!” He said, “I did send a tweet to NASA and ISRO. I sent emails to a couple of NASA scientists. They were in charge of the LRO (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter) images. I got a good response from them.”
ISRO had lost contact with the lander Vikram following its launch from Chandrayaan-2 Moon orbiter on September 6 when it tried to make a soft-landing near the Moon’s South Pole. A successful soft-landing on Moon’s surface would have made the country only the fourth – after the United States, Russia, and China – to achieve the feat.
