Vikram the lander was delinked on September 2 from the mother orbiter spacecraft it was riding on. It was gradually slotted into a 35 km x 101 km orbit around the moon. Chandrayaan 2 took off from Sriharikota on July 22 to safe land the ‘Vikram’, carrying its ‘Pragyan’ rover, in a suitable high plain on the lunar surface, at a latitude of about 70º South. But soon after 1.50 a.m. on September 7, in the final minutes of the lander’s descent on its own, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) team in Bengaluru lost contact with the module.