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Moon Space

2 Months After Failed Moon Landing, India Acknowledges Its Craft Crashed (npr.org) 42

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
NPR reports: Back in September, India's hopes for a historic first ended -- inconclusively. High hopes had been riding on its Chandrayaan-2 orbiter. The spacecraft was sending a landing vehicle down to the moon -- an operation that, if successful, would be the first robotic mission at the moon's unexplored south pole and that would make India only the fourth country in history to make a moon landing. Unfortunately, it was not to be. At the time, the Indian Space Research Organisation didn't offer much explanation for the operation's failure besides an ill-timed loss of contact, adding little more than a terse, "Data is being analyzed." Now, the Indian government has offered its first conclusive statement on the incident, in a brief report responding to a lawmaker's question last Wednesday: Put simply, the Vikram lander's braking thrusters malfunctioned, and it crashed.

"During the second phase of descent, the reduction in velocity was more than the designed value. Due to this deviation, the initial conditions at the start of the fine braking phase were beyond the designed parameters," said Jitendra Singh, minister of state for the Department of Space, the ISRO's parent department. "As a result, Vikram hard landed within 500 m of the designated landing site." Singh did not clarify what caused the malfunction in the lander's landing system. The statement is believed to be the first formal acknowledgment by India's government that the craft crashed. In the ISRO's previous public updates on Vikram -- the latest on its website was released back on Sept. 10, several days after the intended landing date -- the agency noted only that it had located the lander but had made "no communication with it yet."
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2 Months After Failed Moon Landing, India Acknowledges Its Craft Crashed More

2 Months After Failed Moon Landing, India Acknowledges Its Craft Crashed

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  • "initial conditions at the start of the fine braking phase were beyond the designed parameters"
    Due to the failure of the previous phase?

    "hard landed within 500 m of the designated landing site."
    See? It didn't crash, it hard landed. And any landing you can walk away from is a good landing. Plus, the crater it left appears to be within 500 m (that is roughly 500 yards) of the designated landing site. So they have that working for them, too.

    • Re: (Score:1, Offtopic)

      by fred6666 ( 4718031 )

      Plus, the crater it left appears to be within 500 m (that is roughly 500 yards) of the designated landing site.

      If you start using non SI units when dealing with space launches, you are pretty much guaranteed to have crashes.

      • I prefer to think of it as 1093.6 cubits.

        Cubits were good enough for the pyramid builders... they should be good enough for anybody.

    • Or the script we got from Stack Exchange really didn't cover this contingency...

    • NPR paraphrased and said it crashed but Jitendra Singh just said blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah...."hard landed"...but never said it crashed. I am waiting for them to get the Tesla truck team on the case and show how it landed fine in previous testing.

  • we need a real orbital space station (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    everything else is a distraction and a waste of time and money, only after we have orbital industries, does moving further out makes any economic sense

    this is just money being used to keep the affluent in cushy prestigious jobs, rather than paying people to actual go into space, which i too dangerous for the affluent

    money is being diverted from real space development to support the upper classes

  • Their Biggest challenge... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Lije Baley ( 88936 ) on Wednesday November 27, 2019 @03:49PM (#59463810)

    ...is not soft landing on the moon, which they came admirably close to, but overcoming politics and face-saving and getting on with solving the problem. The U.S. didn't expect to succeed on their first try (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveyor_1 [wikipedia.org]) and admittedly got lucky. Doing real stuff is rare and hard, and failure should be expected and respected.

  • Why are we spending money on space missions when children in Flint , Michigan still dont have clean water

    • Not only Flint - the USA and Canada are quite backwards in the supply of clean water. Many communities are still served with lead pipes, hundred years after lead pipes were removed in the rest of the developed world. Not the mention the communities that don't even have lead pipes...

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by ghoul ( 157158 )

        Wasn't really looking for a serious discussion on the failings of US infrastructure. This was more of a pre-emptive strike to cutoff the stupid comments which always come out on any topic on the Indian space program regarding toilets, poverty and investment into R&D.

        Its as if people dont realize that a space program actually reduces poverty through tech spinoffs.

        Or if they do they think progress is to be reserved for Western countries only.

        • It was a cute troll, but it's worth pointing out that the majority of the people in India would be thrilled to get an infrastructure upgrade which brings them in line with Flint standards.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by ghoul ( 157158 )

            Noted.

            Of course Flint would probably have worse infrastructure and US be a poorer country if the US had not done the Apollo program in the 60s and benefited from the many tech spinoffs from that program.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Sloppy ( 14984 )

      Because those lazy Flintians keep paying their taxes to the state of Michigan and the US federal government instead of India. India's parliament is just playing hardball by callously blowing them off until they agree to proper incorporation. No representation without taxation, biatches!

  • If it's just a hard landing doesn't that imply the payload(s) it carried may be OK and able to be recovered? I thought they had some experiments on-board...

    Going tio be interesting when we are on the Moon and Mars with great regularity and we can just fly over to see what happened to all the failed probes.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ghoul ( 157158 )

      In the sequel Matt Damon gets left behind on the Moon and then uses the lander from the hard landing to signal home.

  • All jokes aside, you have to start somewhere and even with this failure I hope they continue their advancements.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by ghoul ( 157158 )

      Well they had 13 scientific experiments on the orbiter and 2 on the lander. The Orbiter is fine and returning science data so 90% of the mission is considered successful as the launch and orbital capture also worked.

      However the lander was the sexy piece as that was the piece not done earlier (Chandrayaan1 had managed lunar orbit as well)

      India is using the Backup lander to launch a lander only mission next year. So hopefully ISRO will change this failure into success.

  • hm, wonder what their system is missssssin'....

  • "During the second phase of descent, the reduction in velocity was more than the designed value. Due to this deviation, the initial conditions at the start of the fine braking phase were beyond the designed parameters,"

    If reduction in velocity was more than what was expected, I would expect that would make it easier to land the thing. Time to pad their constraints.

    --
    I always knew I was a star And now, the rest of the world seems to agree with me. - Freddie Mercury

    • If reduction in velocity was more than what was expected, I would expect that would make it easier to land the thing. Time to pad their constraints.

      If, during second phase of the descent, reduction in velocity were more than what was expected, I would expect that it ran out of fuel during the fine braking phase....

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ghoul ( 157158 )

      If it braked too much during the initial braking then when the fine braking motors took over it was too high and the fine braking algorithm was not able to handle the extra height it started from.

  • You do know that China doesn't want India to get to the moon, right?

  • They probably had them reboot it mid-flight :|

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ghoul ( 157158 )

      Let's give them a participation trophy and everything will be fine.

    • Beresheet tried that, unsuccessfully. At least they were game to immediately owning up to the obvious fact that they had crashed, good attempt, try again and all that rot. Compared to that Indians trying to pretend away their crash is just embarrassing, it's obvious to everyone that it crashed, own up and move on, it's not like crashes are unexpected for anyone trying a Moon landing for the first time.
  • A non profit radio telescope captured S-Band info and from the doppler shift it looks as if the spacecraft had tumbled on its crash trajectory. Video explaining this: https://youtu.be/5xKJG00-S_c [youtu.be]
  • There was a lot of hype, spin, deflection and marketing waffle, instead of a straightforward acknowledgement of the facts. It's very disappointing that messaging and politicking wins over facts and science.

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