NASA找到消失8年的印度首艘月球太空船

US space agency NASA has successfully located India's first lunar spacecraft Chandrayaan-1 that lost contact with ground controllers on Earth eight years ago.

日前，美國航天局NASA已經成功定位到印度首艘月球太空船--月球飛船一號，該飛船於8年前發射，但隨後便與地球上的地面控制人員失去了聯繫。

NASA found the spacecraft by using a new technological application of ground-based interplanetary radar and said it's still circling some 200 kilometers above the lunar surface.

NASA是通過陸基星際雷達的新技術發現了該宇宙飛船，並稱它目前仍在月球表面上空200公里處盤旋。

This new technique also discovered an active spacecraft orbiting the moon, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO).

這項新技術還發現了另一艘仍然圍繞月球運行的飛船，那便是NASA的月球軌道探測器（LRO）。

LRO was launched on June 18, 2009, while India's Chandrayaan-1 was launched on October 22, 2008.

月球軌道探測器LRO號發射於2009年6月18日，而印度的月球飛船一號則發射於2008年10月22日。

'Finding LRO was relatively easy, as we were working with the mission's navigators and had precise orbit data where it was located', Marina Brozovic, a radar scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and principal investigator for the test project, said in a statement.

美國宇航局噴氣推進實驗室及其測試項目的主要負責人瑪麗娜·布洛祖維克在一份聲明中表示：“相對來說，找到LRO是比較容易的。因爲我們一直與該任務的領航員一起工作並且有它位置的精確軌道數據。”

'Finding India's Chandrayaan-1 required a bit more detective work because the last contact with the spacecraft was in August of 2009.'

“由於最後一次聯絡是在2009年8月，因此尋找印度的月球飛船一號就需要更多的偵察工作。”

More troubling was that the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft is very small, about half the size of a smart car, and about 380,000 kilometers away.

更麻煩的是，月球飛船一號體積非常小，尺寸大約爲一輛智能汽車的一半，並且遠在38萬公里之外。

To find the spacecraft, the team used NASA's 70-meter antenna at the agency's Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex in California to send out a powerful beam of microwaves directed toward the moon.

爲了找到它，該團隊運用了位於加利福尼亞州的戈德斯通深層空間通信中心的70公尺口徑天線，向月球發出強大的微波束。

NASA said these large radar antennas demonstrated that they can detect and track small spacecraft in lunar orbit.

美國宇航局表示，這些大型雷達探測器證明，他們可以探測和跟蹤到小型的月球軌道探測器。

"Ground-based radars could possibly play a part in future robotic and human missions to the moon, both for a collisional hazard assessment tool and as a safety mechanism for spacecraft that encounter navigation or communication issues," the agency added.

該機構補充道：“不管是作爲碰撞危險評估工具，還是作爲航天器遇到導航或通信問題的安全機制，在未來的機器人和人類登月任務中，地面雷達都有可能會起到一定的作用。”