NASA’s Lunar reconnaissance Orbiter will attempt to find India’s Vikram lander on the moon during a flyover landing site on Tuesday. Indian space officials said they found a disabled spacecraft on the moon using the country’s own Chandrayaan 2 Orbiter, but declined to release any images.

The LRO’s high-resolution camera took aerial photos of the Apollo landing sites with enough clarity to eliminate the traces of astronauts left on the moon more than 40 years ago. NASA’s Orbiter camera also dislodged China’s Chang’e 3 and Chang’e 4 lander on the moon and located the crash site of Israel’s Beresheet spacecraft earlier this year.

Noah Petro, an LRO project scientist at NASA’s Goddard space flight Center, said the Orbiter should fly over the Vikram landing site on Tuesday, September 17.

“In NASA policy, all LRO data is in the public domain,” Petro wrote in an email. “NASA will share any before and after flyover images of the area around the target Chandrayaan 2 Vikram lander to support analysis by the Indian space research organization.”

ISRO said Tuesday that the chandrayan 2 Orbiter, which is launched in tandem with the Vikram lander, has detected a lander on the moon’s surface.

“The Vikram lander has been detected on the chandrayan 2 Orbiter, but there is no communication with it yet,” ISRO said in a brief statement. “Every effort is being made to establish communication with () the lander.”

The Indian space Agency ISRO has not released any of the images purporting to show the Vikram lander on the moon, and ISRO representatives have not responded to Spaceflight Now’s request for more information.

The Indian space Agency has not confirmed whether the lander is intact on the moon’s surface, or its orientation. It is not clear the Chandrayaan 2 camera can solve such details with confidence.

“We believe (Vikram) made a harder landing than they wanted on Friday night,” said Laurie glaze, head of NASA’s planetary science division, in a presentation Tuesday to the national academies Committee on astrobiology and planetary Sciences.

NASA’s Deep Space Network station near Madrid was in contact with the Vikram lander as it descended to a landing site near the moon’s South pole Friday. The signal from the robotic lander abruptly ended minutes before the planned landing, and the spacecraft apparently deviated from its planned trajectory at an altitude of just under 6,500 feet, or 2 kilometers.

NASA tracking stations have been trying to contact the Vikram lander since last Friday, but as of Thursday, officials have not reestablished communication with the spacecraft. The lander was designed to survive on the moon’s surface for 14 days, so time is limited.

The Vikram lander carried a Rover named Pragyan – the Sanskrit word for “wisdom” – and several scientific instruments, including cameras, seismic sensors, a payload of rock composition and an underground thermal conductivity probe. Vikram, named after the father of India’s space program, is also equipped with a laser reflector provided by the US that NASA intended to use to accurately measure the distance between the Earth and the Moon.

Israel’s Beresheet lander, which crashed on the moon in April, was also carrying NASA’s laser retroreflector. The laser almiter instrument on the LRO scans the Beresheet landing site in an attempt to get a reflection from the instrument, which was completely passive and may have survived the crash.

The LRO could conduct a similar search for Vikram’s laser retroflector, glase said.

“We had NASA’s laser Array retroreflector fly on this mission, so we will look at this as we go forward, just as we continue to look for the laser Array retroreflector That was on Beresheet,” Glaze said. “We hope to get some images where that lander put to rest.”

With a resolution of 32 centimeters, or 12.6 inches, the high-resolution camera on the Chandrayaan 2 Orbiter can see more detail on the moon’s surface than any lunar Orbiter mission to date. But the American Orbiter is able to find Vikram or his wreckage.

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, or LROC, has two narrow-angle cameras providing images with a resolution of 50 centimeters (19.7 inches). Operated at Arizona state University, the LROC was developed By Malin Space Science Systems and is based on a context camera carried aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

The LROC is one of seven scientific instruments on the LRO, but it has received considerable public attention due to its ability to detect changes on the moon’s surface. He found fresh impact craters on the moon, in addition to his work searching for lander and surveying landing sites for a number of commercial and international missions, including China’s first lunar lander, Chandrayaan 2, and future U.S. missions.

Petro said Monday to pass over the Vikram LRO landing site will be tough. The sun will be low on the horizon, creating long shadows on the surface.

If Monday’s rendering capability doesn’t find Vikram, the LRO will have additional flyovers in the coming weeks and months.

Meanwhile, Indian scientists are keen to start analyzing data from the Chandrayaan 2 Orbiter, which ISRO says should have a “long life of nearly 7 years, not a planned year” because of the precise launch and injections into lunar orbit.

Follow Stephen Clarke on Twitter: @StephenClark1.