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Chandrayaan Enters Lunar Orbit
Posted by
Soulskill
on Sat Nov 08, 2008 12:17 PM
from the fly-me-to-the-moon dept.
from the fly-me-to-the-moon dept.
William Robinson writes "After an 18-day journey, Chandrayaan-1, the moon mission of India, has entered Lunar orbit. The maneuver was described as crucial and critical by scientists, who pointed out that at least 30 per cent of similar moon missions had failed at this juncture, resulting in spacecraft lost to outer space. The lunar orbit insertion placed Chandrayaan-1 in an elliptical orbit with its nearest point 400 to 500 kilometers away from the moon, and the farthest, 7,500 kilometers. By November 15, the spacecraft is expected to be orbiting the moon at a distance of 100 kilometers and sending back data and images (the camera was tested with shots looking back at Earth). The Chandrayaan-1 is also scheduled to send a probe to the moon's surface."
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Chandrayaan-1 Successfully Reaches 100km Lunar Orbit 152 comments
Matt_dk writes "Today, Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft has successfully reached its intended operational orbit at a height of about 100 km from the lunar surface. This followed a series of three orbit reduction manoeuvres conducted during the past three days by repeatedly firing the spacecraft's 440 Newton Liquid Engine.
The next major event of Chandrayaan-1 mission planned in the coming days is the release of Moon Impact Probe (MIP) from the spacecraft and its eventual hitting of the moon's surface."
[+]
India's Chandrayaan Lands Impact Probe On the Moon 203 comments
yaksha writes to tell us that the Indian Space probe, Chandrayaan, has become only the fourth nation to land a probe on the Moon. The 35-kg Moon Impact Probe touched down in what officials are describing as a "perfect operation." "Developed by ISRO's Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre of Thiruvananthapuram, the primary objective of MIP is to demonstrate the technologies required for landing a probe at the desired location on the moon. The probe will help qualify some of the technologies related to future soft landing missions. This apart, scientific exploration of the moon at close distance is also intended using MIP."
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My other car is a Porsche... on the MOON (Score:5, Funny)
Too bad the Moon's just one big tourist trap now.
Fascinating photos (Score:4, Interesting)
The size of the craft, at over 1300 kg, is a big honking'* thing. I wonder what kind of tracking systems they are using.
*Honkin' is a technical term.
Re:Fascinating photos (Score:5, Informative)
Yes!, it is, and for a reason. It's carrying the largest number of payloads ever carried by a lunar mission - 11.
5 (TMC, HySI, LLRI, HEX, MIP) - ISRO
2 (C1XS, SARA) - ESA + ISRO
1 (SIR-2) - Max Planck, Germany
1 (RADOM) - Bulgarian Academy of Sciences
1 (Mini-SAR) - NASA
1 (M3) - Brown University & JPL
More info here on ISRO page [isro.org]. :-)
So it's kinda an international mission
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Moon Impact Probe (Score:5, Funny)
From the linked article: "The spacecraft will make observations from the initial orbit, and then the orbit will be lowered a 100 km circular polar orbit. Following this, the Moon Impact Probe (MIP) will be ejected, impacting the lunar surface."
I going to give my car a new name... Instead of "the old Honda Civic", I'm going to call it the "Car Impact Probe" ...that way I can justify all of my accidents as being for science's sake.
Re:Moon Impact Probe (Score:5, Funny)
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I used my Honda Civic as an impact probe last month and to be honest, it wasn't as fun as I thought it would be.
Of course ... (Score:2)
... this blows the 'turtles all the way down' [wikipedia.org] model of orbital mechanics right out of the water.
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Awesome! (Score:5, Insightful)
Agree (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:American ego... (Score:2)
Shall we point out that India is also a nuclear power and has three times the population of the USA?
Hopefully this is all prelude to an effort to find/extract He3 from the moon. As such the USA, India, China, Russia, etc. should be working as a team, not against each other. Energy/climate problems are global and don't stop at national boundaries.
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I still wonder how the american ego can live with this?
I don't think it would be a big deal to most Americans. For example, you don't hear a huge outcry over the fact that we don't build the most sophisticated robots anymore (according to popular perception at least). We tend to generally admire the Japanese inventiveness and industry. American culture is largely built on competition: political, economic, sporting events, etc. This means that people learn to deal with losing, since it inevitably happens to anyone that competes at anything.
Re:Awesome! (Score:5, Interesting)
It would be really cool if they could send back a nice high res picture of one of the old Apollo missions - just to kill of the conspiracy theories once and for all. Although the theorists would no doubt immediately claim them as fakes...
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It would be really cool if they could send back a nice high res picture of one of the old Apollo missions - just to kill of the conspiracy theories once and for all. Although the theorists would no doubt immediately claim them as fakes...
There's a simple solution to that. Somebody's got to take pictures of Chandrayaan, and somebody else needs to take pictures of the somebody taking pictures of Chandrayaan, and so on, and so forth, ad nauseum ad infinitum. Looks like a job for elephants all the way down!
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Naturally. I remember once asking one of those people why it was that the Soviets never denounced Apollo as faked. Given that they were surely monitoring all transmissions and independently tracking the whole mission by radar. Apparently they were in on it too. An admirab
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The Lunar Reconaissance Orbiter will do that next year.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Reconnaissance_Orbiter [wikipedia.org]
Awesome (Score:4, Funny)
The scientific community will certainly not stay hindi-fferent to this expansion of India's science curry-culum!
Re:Awesome (Score:5, Funny)
The scientific community will certainly not stay hindi-fferent to this expansion of India's science curry-culum!
That's sikh. Trying to curry favour with the mods using such blatant pun jabs. I hope they're having nan of that.
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Hey! Some people didn't know how to groan before this article!
Nice summary of the mission... (Score:4, Informative)
The ISRO site has a page on how the orbits look like in the Mission Sequence page [isro.org].
And to anybody still complaining about India spending money on its space mission when 500 million people are in poverty, you are not the first [gilscottheron.com].
Wow, wtf (Score:4, Insightful)
If you're having a hard time making out the image, it might be because the image is flipped, as though looking at it in a mirror. Emily Lakdawalla over at the Planetary Society blog figured this out and has flipped the image for us (see below). Why is the original image backwards? Emily explains, "Data doesn't come down from spacecraft in familiar formats like JPEG or TIFF; it's a stream of ones and zeroes, with a format unique to the science instrument, and scientists and engineers write their own software for translating that into raw image data. There are varying conventions for whether bits are written right or left, and if you take that raw image data and open it up in a piece of off-the-shelf image processing software, the image might be backwards." As Emily says, the error is not really important.
Wow, who fucking cares. Just flip it, who cares how their internal format represents the image. The BMP format is vertically flipped, does anyone care or convert BMP images so that they appear flipped vertically? No, nobody cares, god damnit, so why make half of the bloody article about it?
three lunar orbiters .. all asian (Score:5, Informative)
There are currently three spacecraft orbiting the moon. Japanese Kayuga/Selene, Chinese Chang'e and now Chandrayaan. Approximate budgets:
# Chandrayaan-I (India) - $86m
# Chang'e (China) - $187m
# Kayuga (Japan) - $480m
NASA is about to follow up with its own, mid-2009
# LRO - around half a billion ?
China and Japan have announced followup lander missions as well, and there is Google Lunar X-Prize card too, so the next lunar landing will be likely be done by one of these parties ( The last one was by USSR, back in 1976 )
Moon, while basically neglected for past few decades ( with notable exceptions of ESA Smart-1 and american low-budget Clementine and Lunar Prospector ), is about to get quite crowded.
Chandrayaan-2 (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, just to remind, India has already commenced work on Chandrayaan-2, which will soft-land a rover on the Moon.
http://www.chandrayaan-i.com/chandrayaan2/index2.html [chandrayaan-i.com]
This mission should happen in just over 3 years. Here is the countdown clock:
http://www.chandrayaan-i.com/chandrayaan2/when2.html [chandrayaan-i.com]
Pictures of US stuff (Score:3, Funny)
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Yes, Kayuga imaged Apollo 15 and 17 landing sites back in February
http://www.spaceentrepreneurs.org/profiles/blog/show?id=1369058%3ABlogPost%3A11443 [spaceentrepreneurs.org]
Hope in other nations (Score:4, Interesting)
Since NASA seems to be stuck in the tar pit of safety, security and budget cuts, it's highly unlikely to see any of 'minor but constant' progress from them - they can only afford a few highly outstanding projects that must be polished till they shine, because any failure is unacceptable, and which are scheduled for dates like 2015, 2030 or so. They can't afford what was a standard 'in the early days', 50 failed tests in a row, a lot of improvisation and fixing problems as they appear. Back then, when a $1mln piece of equipment got destroyed, you built another and slapped an additional $500 subsystem on top of it. Currently you build a $1mln piece of equipment with a $20mln fault-prevention subsystem and it will not fail, at least in theory. Which takes maybe half the money but 10 times as much time than 40 iterations of the $1mln 'retry' method.
Russia is stuck with commercial. They do a lot of it and are great at it, cheap, fast, simple, tested thousands of time in practice, with small iterative improvements but without any huge breakthroughs, not much science is being done.
It's China and India that push for scientific advances, big and fast. They took a sprint in the race to catch up, and they are really the motor of the progress, budget is subject for negotiation, deadlines are not, if it fails, that's okay, we just try again, prevent 90% of expected accidents and hope for the best about the remaining 10%, make prayers and sacrifices to Murphy and prefer to have a half-working solution in a month than a fully-working one in five years.
Some astronauts will lose lives.
Billions of dollars worth of equipment will become junk.
But the science will be getting done, and on good schedule. (for the people who are still alive)
Re:Hope in other nations (Score:4, Informative)
You might find this [chandrayaan-i.com] interesting:
"The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and Russia's Federal Space Agency (Roskosmos) have signed an Agreement on joint lunar research and exploration. This cooperation envisages Chandrayaan-2, a joint lunar mission involving a lunar orbiting spacecraft and a Lander/Rover on the Moon's surface. ISRO will have the prime responsibility for the Orbiter and Roskosmos will be responsible for the Lander/Rover."
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Congratulations to our friends in India! (Score:3)
It's good to know that although the US has surrendered the leadership role, progress will go on.
A short summary of my expert opinion: (Score:2)
Re:Does it too smell of curry? (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, India is one of the most cutting edge countries in a lot research fields. Glaring back at the USA do we not having starving and homeless? Just because we trade their tribal suffering for urban suffering doesn't mean either countries don't have the same problems. Even more so I'd say China is hardly a third world country. It's economic growth will soon put it on top of the USA. You just see culturally different nations as "third world" Is Sweeden third world too with all their socialism?
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Re:Does it too smell of curry? (Score:5, Funny)
Is Sweeden third world too with all their socialism?
of course not, socialism puts the "wee!!!" in Sweeden
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Re:Does it too smell of curry? (Score:4, Insightful)
You only read about the rich in china and the communist govt's facade of "how good things have become" to the rest of the world.
Did you watch too much of the farce of an olympics this year to think that everything is fine and dandy in China? Probably. Wake up.
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Discount 2 billion people trading with each other at your own peril.
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Except people do still starve to death, only it is the socially ignored old man who sleeps in the park because he is too proud to go to a shelter. This demographic often freezes to death.
Re:Nobody is starving in the US (Score:5, Insightful)
it has nothing to do with being too proud. a large portion of the homeless population in the U.S. are mentally ill. we just aren't willing to fund the social programs and mental health infrastructure to take care of these people, so they end up in the streets. and not all cities with a homeless population have shelters. in my area there are neither homeless shelters nor facilities for the mentally disabled. this has been known for quite some time but little has been done about it.
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just aren't willing to fund the social programs and mental health infrastructure to take care of these people, so they end up in the streets. and not all cities with a homeless population have shelters
You seem like someone who has never spent any time with any crazy homeless people. Nearly all big cities do have shelters. All the ones I've visited and had the chance to look do (Orlando, Chicago, New York, Atlanta, Indianapolis).
Those are generally *not* for the crazy homeless, though. They're for the tem
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"we realized that "fixing" such people means that we're curtailing their freedom - freedom to be crazy, and freedom to make the choices that leave them homeless."
One thing I'm curious about -- what percentage of 'crazy homeless people' in the USA are war veterans? Are there any statistics on this?
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Except people do still starve to death, only it is the socially ignored old man who sleeps in the park because he is too proud to go to a shelter. This demographic often freezes to death.
Pick one or the other, AC, but not both: if they freeze to death, they can't have starved to death.
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What if your inability to keep up your body temperature was caused by insufficient blood sugar and abnormally thin subcutaneous fat layer, caused by starvation ?
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Re:Does it too smell of curry? (Score:5, Insightful)
Aside from the troll, he has sort of a point. India has massive inequality problems, is still haunted by the caste system (perhaps the only advantage of Mao was he got rid of equivalent crap from China, at quite steep a cost).
Its possible space technology will filter down and help the poorest people, but somehow I doubt it. If you want to look beyond the western media fawning over India's neoliberal development, look up the 'Naxalite' and 'Salwa Judum'. It isn't all roses and tech support over there.
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Re:Does it too smell of curry? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Does it too smell of curry? (Score:5, Insightful)
then perhaps the U.S. should shelf all fundamental research until we get our poverty level down to at least as low as Eastern Europe. it helps no one to point fingers at others whiles our own domestic problems continue to go ignored.
also, if we get rid of all fundamental research, where do you recommend scientists & researchers go for employment? are they all going to be re-trained in order to find a place in a society without fundamental scientific research? or should they start a mass exodus of intellectual/scientific talent out of the U.S.?
what effect do you think abolishing public research will have on a society? if people are discouraged from going into the sciences & exploratory research, what effect will that have on our national culture? we already live in society rife with anti-intellectualism and reactionary attitudes. do you really think cutting all funding for fundamental science & public research is going to have a positive social effect on either the U.S. or India?
we fund public research in fundamental science not because it strokes our national ego, or as part of some lofty abstract idealistic goal, but because public research is vital to societal progress. it not only drives a society forward technologically, but it also fosters an intellectual culture and encourages rational thought. when you do away with fundamental research, you're killing the pursuit of knowledge, and that will simply invite intellectual & cultural stagnation.
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India has massive inequality problems, is still haunted by the caste system
You must be referring to K.R.Narayanan [wikipedia.org], President of India 1997-2002. He was born a Dalit, one of the lowest castes possible.
I'm not trying to deny the existence of castism in India. It is still present in some of the rural areas, but it is on the wane.
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I used to think the same as you, but the INSAT series was very beneficial to India, including the rural population. While a moon mission may not make as much sense, I think it is worthwhile because it gives the ISRO experience. And that is useful because the ISRO makes quite a bit of money from launching commercial satellites.
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Yes, it was outspaced to a robotic probe.
It's funny - 30 years ago, everyone in manufacturing was scared they were going to lose their jobs to Japanese robots. Now everyone is scared they are going to lose their jobs to Indian workers.
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