Watch India's Chandrayaan-2 Make Its Historic Moon Landing Attempt (techcrunch.com) 56
It's a big day for India's highly audacious Chandrayaan-2 mission. From a report: The nation will attempt to land its lunar orbit on the moon's surface shortly as it inches closer to become the fourth in the world to complete a successful lunar landing. ISRO, India's equivalent of NASA, is live streaming the landing on its website, and YouTube channel. The landing is scheduled for between 1pm and 2pm Pacific Time (4pm to 5pm Eastern Time; 8pm to 9pm GMT). ISRO launched its 142 feet tall spacecraft from the the Satish Dhawan Space Centre, Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh on July 15. The spacecraft consists of an orbiter, a lander named Vikram (named after Vikram Sarabhai, the father of India's space program), and a six-wheeled rover named Pragyaan (Sanskrit for "wisdom"). Earlier this week, the lander that carried the rover detached from the orbiter. The mission's budget is just $141 million, significantly lower than those of other countries, and less than half of the recently released blockbuster "Avengers: Endgame."
Wohoo! (Score:2)
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Yea .. damn everyone in there looks so sad or upset. They probably lost it :(
God damn you moon! Stop eating our drones!
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Yea .. damn everyone in there looks so sad or upset. They probably lost it :(
God damn you moon! Stop eating our drones!
Agreed. Just checked the stream and no smiles anywhere and several stand-up meetings around the room. Doesn't look good. :(
Re: Wohoo! (Score:2)
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Nope, loss of communications below 1km
Chandrayaan-2 is still alive!
It just called me and identified itself as "Lunar Windows Support" and that I needed to download something from the Moon.
He said that the download might take a while.
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I sure hope that the crashed Indian spacecraft will not pollute moon with microbes [the-scientist.com] like the Israeli one did.
Best of Luck (Score:1)
What's the relative RoI? (Score:1)
I have extremely mixed feelings on this. On the one hand, I think science is good and India is aggressively trying to drive the costs down. On the other hand, the reason they are so focused on the costs is because India is largely a poor country, with over 250 million people (over 20% of the population) living in poverty as of 2011.
On the third hand, the motivations of proving how big and bad they are (as a Hindu nation?) does NOT impress me. At all. The RoI from this moon mission seems minuscule. What woul
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That's one of the silliest comments I've ever seen, even for today's Slashdot. I'm searching for a more diplomatic adjective than "silliest", but coming up dry. So far all of the candidates that are more accurate come off sounding even worse. But it does not appear that you were seeking a Funny mod.
Most obviously, out of all the countries on earth, only a handful are "doing these kinds of projects". So what, prey tell, do you think is stopping all the other countries? Excessive wealth?
Actually, going by the
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Yes, and the data I linked to in my comment confirms that. However I feel that I must insist that some forms of science are better than others, and India's space program is basically an extension of it's military program, which is more of a problem than a program. I don't know how much of the history you've studied, but the basic idea of Partition was to create a weak and divided India, even though England had preferred a unified and relatively strong (and secular) India when they were running things and se
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People can't spend every minute of their day licking their wounds or they will never progress, or even survive. We must keep moving forward while we work on our problems.
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As a statement of general principle, I agree with you and the reply is basically an ACK. I am NOT anti-science.
However I do think there are problems with priorities and motivations here, and I feel like I didn't make that clear enough. This particular solution is not addressing the main problems India faces. As noted in another reply, I fear it may even make other problems worse.
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What would be the RoI if they had spent that money feeding (or even educating?) poor people?
Even less. The budget for their space program is tiny compared to their rural development program. And while India has plenty of poor and poorly educated people, they are not a poor or backward nation. They have high tech industries, and good schools, which are probably helped a little bit by their space program. In terms of jobs, supporting industries, as well as pride and inspiration, this might actually have a pretty good ROI. India's best bet to fight poverty is to grow their economy (that Wiki art
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Well presented, but I still can't tell to what degree you are agreeing with me and to what degree you are disagreeing. Perhaps most significantly, I don't see how the numbers support your opening of "Even less."
Let me try to reword it. I think the technological innovations that reduced the costs of this mission are basically good. If they hadn't been able to get that far, then they would have been forced to give up. But there is no direct return on investment. Just some bragging rights. There might be some
ISRO, do me the needful! (Score:2)
Soft landing! Soft landing!
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There's still hope, telemetry shows it stopped about half a kilometer up. Now they just need to ease it down...
Re: ISRO, do me the needful! (Score:2)
I really hope that was a joke :) hard to tell with the quality of Slashdot comments these days ...
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Not just a joke, an OLD joke. You know, the one where parachuting instructor and his student jump out of the plane, and the student keeps asking when to pull the ripcord and the instructor keeps saying "not yet". When the instructor finally tells the student to pull the ripcord, the student says "not yet", and when he gets close enough to the ground he says "It's OK, I can jump from here". Or something like that...
Just in time for the crash (Score:2)
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Yea, I just started watching too and the linked article said between 4 and 5 EST landing so I was hoping to see something but it's a lot of nervous or bored looking people in hushed tones.
Then I saw all the comments saying they lost comms like 20 minutes ago so ... yea.
It's dead Jim? (Score:3)
Communications lost in the fine-braking stage of the descent at just under 400m. Not looking good :-(
Looks like a lithobrake (Score:2)
They lost signal towards the end of the landing maneuver and haven't managed to get it back. The lander was moving pretty fast at the time. The Moon is a harsh mistress.
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There's a lesson here for the $3 billion dollar lunar base squad. It's not as easy as it looks. Indeed the last time the US landed anything on the moon was in 1972.
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edi_guy noted:
There's a lesson here for the $3 billion dollar lunar base squad. It's not as easy as it looks. Indeed the last time the US landed anything on the moon was in 1972.
Which - not coincidentally - was the last time the USA tried to soft-land "anything" (which, in that case, was a LEM-and-rover combination) on Luna ...
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There's a lesson here for the $3 billion dollar lunar base squad. It's not as easy as it looks. Indeed the last time the US landed anything on the moon was in 1972.
I'm not sure what those guys are smoking that makes them think they can set up an entire human-populated base on the moon for only 21X the cost of this single "low budget" robot probe.
Re: Looks like a lithobrake (Score:2)
My guess is they're betting on prices dropping even further than they have over the last decade. Which, if all goes well with the development of Starship/super-heavy .... yeah, it's plausible.
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Just solving the problems of living on the moon is going to cost far, far more than $3B, even if delivery were free.
Re: Looks like a lithobrake (Score:2)
Good one
Apparently... (Score:3, Funny)
Apparently the link was interrupted by a call from the Windows department of the Microsoft support with a message that reads:
"We have been getting reports that your computers are infected by worms and wiruses and that hackers are accessing your computer through your IP number that is connecting to the internet..."
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We're all space nutters now (Score:5, Interesting)
Whether or not this landing succeeds, consider that in today's world there are a large number of individuals who could afford $141 million. The private road to the solar system lies open.
I love living in the future.
Hardmode (Score:2)
No quick save to restore from and retry. Bloody shame.
"Landed" too early? (Score:5, Informative)
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A small mistake for a space craft, but a big fubar for a nation, sadly.
Just less then 0.0006%, considering the earth-moon distance....
Re:"Landed" too early? (Score:4, Interesting)
one of the mars landers did that, the g sensor mistook the shake of the landing gear deploying as meaning "contact with ground" and it shut off the engine.
So then it fell like a rock (from 300 ft or meters iirc?) and made a new crater on the surface.
I would hope India would learn from others mistakes like that.
(the lander software was revised to prevent the next one from arming the "shut engine off" sequence until like 20 seconds after leg deployment)
India's last hope to find more water (Score:1)
This mission was India's best hope to find more water to combat the water drought crisis in large cities. It looks like it didn't work.
141 millions will sure feed 1 billion poor people (Score:2)
And also get them out of poverty.
Re:well spent $141 milions? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Some of the tech workers might be out of a job now, heh.
Too soon? (Score:1)
Did they try... (Score:4, Funny)
That will teach them... (Score:1)
not to steal Tesla's collision avoidance software