Degree does not matter, says Chennai techie who helped Nasa find Vikram lander debris

Shanmuga Subramanian - Chennai techie who helped Nasa find Vikram lander debris (PTI)

A software engineer from Chennai with no formal training and no sophisticated equipment has been able to do what scientists from the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and US space agency Nasa had been trying to do for months. Amateur space scientist Shanmuga Subramanian has found the debris of Vikram lander - India's moon rover and part of the Chandrayan-2 mission.

The rover had gone incommunicado on September 7, during the final stages of a mission that had been poised to make India only the fourth nation in history to land on the moon.

Shanmuga Subramanian, 33, says he scoured the images clicked by Nasa's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LRO) for four to six hours for several nights before he spotted a tiny white dot. He had spotted the Vikram lander's debris in early October and had been waiting for Nasa's response on his find.

On December 3, in a statement describing new images of the debris, Nasa credited him with the first positive identification of debris, and mark his finding on a map. (See spot marked "S" on the photo below).

"It took me two to three days to just zero-in on the area of landing. Because images produced by LRO were so vast, it was impossible to do a pixel by pixel scan," Shanmuga Subramanian told India Today TV's Rajdeep Sardesai. he said that he could bring down his search are to a two by two square kilometre area with the help of online forums about Isro.

Elated by validation of his find by Nasa, Shanmuga Subramanian, who is an app developer and mechanical engineer by profession, says when it comes to passion, a degree does not matter.

"Learning is a continuous process, we should not stop learning at any point in time. and even if you don't hold any degrees, it does not matter. Ultimately it is all about what we have done so far in our life. I would say that amateurs should start looking at space as an option," he said.

Shanmuga Subramanian said that what he has done was a small part of space exploration being undertaken by amateurs like him. "There are several others who do a lot more like spotting satellite debris. There are a lot of things to be done in space. I would ask them [space enthusiasts] to try it out and do whatever they can do about it."