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India to Attempt Moon Landing at the Lunar South Pole Today
- saagarjha 7y ago> The mission entered orbit just under a month later, with the Chandrayaan-2 orbiter placed into orbit 62 (100 meters) above the lunar surface. Uh, I think you might be missing some correct units there…
- notus 7y agoI feel like India has more important problems to solve than this.
- z3phyr 7y agoDoes your country do one thing at a time?
- notus 7y agoNo but the amount of poverty they have relative to my country is not even comparable and this just takes away money that could be used for that.
- justincase_120 7y agooh boy, how come scientists missed this. They should hire you immediately to ask such tough questions.
- seph-reed 7y agoScientific industries are the natural habitat of some of the most amazing and rare humans in existence. To destroy their means of living for the sake of supporting a self-destructively prolific form of human seems like a really poor decision.
- shhshahassa 7y agoThis is the strangest comment i've ever read. Using the term 'rare humans' non-ironically really gives me the creeps.
- spai2 7y agoWhere do you think the money is going? Is it being spent within the Indian economy, or is cash being lifted to the moon?
- gingabriska 7y ago>Where do you think the money is going? Is it being spent within the Indian economy, or is cash being lifted to the moon? Meanwhile Indian economy is in downward spiral. Depending on one organization to change anything is a dangerous bet. They should be opening market so that we can have private space companies like SpaceX
- umvi 7y agoBelieve it or not, you can't solve poverty by throwing money at poor people, as counter intuitive as it might seem.
- notus 7y agoyeah you can, pretty much every measure to mitigate poverty costs money, housing first, dietary education, food stamps, etc
- sidcool 7y agoThere will always be one such comment. I haven't ever been let down.
- rolltiide 7y agoGAAP accounting to further refine their moon mission costs so they dont wind up orbit bound like America?
- asah 7y agohaha, ultimate hypocrisy: posting on HN when you could be solving <whatever you think the world's biggest problem is>. Life and economic success is not about everybody solving the One Biggest Problem(tm) to the exclusion of all else.
- dmix 7y agoReminds me of those old Mastercard commercials. "[some commonly purchased object]: $5 A whole generation of kids being inspired by a moon landing: priceless" Examples for the unfamiliar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfel3Kd-IUg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfel3Kd-IUg
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- infiniteseeker 7y ago> I feel like India has more important problems to solve than this. OK. Keep "feeling" and others will keep doing.
- fredfoobar 7y agoThis is such a meme comment, some white dude on the internet thinks he knows better than everybody, what gives? I'm curious how white people reacted when this song dropped: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goh2x_G0ct4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goh2x_G0ct4
- sbmthakur 7y agoCould you list those important problems?
- mayankkaizen 7y agoI also feel like people have more important problems to solve than posting useless comment here.
- sharadov 7y agoWas waiting for this, someone will show up and harp on the poverty! You need a budget for science, above all it inspires a whole generation of young people, it tells that kid in the gutter to dream big! It tells you to be hopeful when the chips are down! And we need this to counter the religious demagoguery in India.
- dang 7y ago"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents." This is a classic flamewar topic that leads to nasty places and never generates anything interesting or new. Please don't go there on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- hos234 7y agoAnyone know how cost effective this is? As in can NASA start outsourcing moon missions?
- sidcool 7y agoThe mission has been executed on a shoe string budget. More than outsourcing, a partnership will be more beneficial. NASA's advanced Technology and ISRO's low costs could be explored.
- greglindahl 7y agoNASA and ISRO are already partners, including for this very mission.
- perseusprime11 7y ago~$140M.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- robofanatic 7y agoYou mean let go NASA scientists?
- actuator 7y agoI think he meant use ISRO's operations to send NASA's probes, rovers, satellites etc. for missions like these. NASA still gets to study and conduct experiments at a lower cost.
- robofanatic 7y agoThat also means let go a chunk of NASA employees handling those operations.
- 7y ago
- kappi 7y agodetails of Rover video https://youtu.be/V9LFnEycVcg https://youtu.be/V9LFnEycVcg
- dmix 7y agoI'm curious why MacOS doesn't ship with a clock app for timers and alarms for this type of stuff. Seems like an obvious choice for an iOS port.
- youeseh 7y agoYou should build one! And then make it so good that Apple will finally copy it for a future version of MacOS :D
- dmix 7y agoI'm only complaining because the ones in the App Store are awful. I just want the native iOS one. But yeah I dont need a 50th side project.
- hello_tyler 7y agoThe calendar ? It's not really a 'clock app' but lets you setup timers and popup notifications. You're right it should be baked in with the system clock.
- billfruit 7y agoIs the landing site on the near side or far side?
- actuator 7y agoNear side[1]. Specifically south polar region of the moon. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandrayaan-2#cite_ref-Rishitosh_2019_23-0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandrayaan-2#cite_ref-Rishito...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- nickserv 7y agoWow what horrible ad laden site with tons of useless videos and JavaScript. Official site: https://www.isro.gov.in/chandrayaan2-latest-updates https://www.isro.gov.in/chandrayaan2-latest-updates
- randyk 7y agoI love India and its people, having spent five years there managing a dev team for our US operations. I’m American, parents were born in India. And I gotta say, landing on the moon is by far the last thing India’s people need right now. The amount of suffering, pollution, corruption, water shortages, is simply overwhelming. If you haven’t actually lived there it’s easy to say that India should still shoot for the stars while solving problems at home. From someone who lived there, let me tell you that they should focus on immediate problems first.
- deathtrader666 7y agoYeah immediate problems are being resolved by some people. But not all of our billion+ population needs to be so myopic.. there's a few that are rightly pushing the boundaries for the global scientific research.
- randyk 7y agoThe people that push for Indian space exploration are either (1) not living in India, or (2) they are living in India and doing well economically. If you ask people living in the slums about this, they’ll give you a very different perspective than what you read on HN. And they vastly outnumber the people in India who are doing well.
- dugluak 7y agoSomeone commented this in another thread >Out of 195 countries it will be only the 4th country to do this shit. So it must be doing some things right. Poverty is one of the problems it is still working on.
- olcor 7y agoI find it interesting that you try to answer for the millions who are "living in the slums". There is enthusiasm for space in general (many are glued to their TVs or radios because the landing is going to start soon; one could say it's a point of national pride). I can say that because I live here, see the poverty in front of my eyes every day and talk to some of the people facing it. Sure, quite a few have opinions similar to yours, but they are across the economic spectrum, not just amongst the poor. This is an argument which pops out frequently when there's a scientific success coming out of a developing country, and especially when India tries to do high-end science. The development in India has been insane, and many have moved out of poverty in a relatively short span of time, mainly because of multiple efforts by the people, the government and with the help of other countries, and this is going to continue happening. Meanwhile, space exploration will continue, whether some people like it or not.
- billfruit 7y agoAny idea what's the name of the area in which it is going to touch down?
- stronglikedan 7y agoAs of yet unnamed, according to an article linked within the article. [0] > It doesn't have a name, at least not yet. But in just a few days, if all goes well, it could become one of the most important places on the moon's surface. > That spot is a highland that rises between two craters dubbed Manzinus C and Simpelius N. On a grid of the moon's surface, it would fall at 70.9 degrees south latitude and 22.7 degrees east longitude. It's about 375 miles (600 kilometers) from the south pole. [0] https://www.space.com/india-chandrayaan-2-moon-south-pole-landing-site.html https://www.space.com/india-chandrayaan-2-moon-south-pole-la...
- whatshisface 7y agoLooks like it crashed during the final slowdown.
- cabaalis 7y agoI've been watching for a few minutes. It appeared to do a weird roll during braking, and then the line of descent greatly varied from the anticipated line. The room was jubilant prior to this, and now very somber. Hopefully there will be good news. But I think it crashed.
- sp332 7y agoThat's the problem with simply losing communication. It's not positive evidence of a crash, it's just a lack of information. Possibly the landing jostled antennas or power relays causing a communications glitch... but you can't rule out that it just crashed :(
- djsumdog 7y agoThey're all just staring at their screens, just waiting for their craft to come back and say something. :(
- vkou 7y agoHas a loss of communication with an unmanned probe on landing ever been resolved?
- sp332 7y agoIt happened before landing, so while the probe may have crashed, a crash did not cause the communications loss. Here are the most similar conditions I could find that recovered: Beresheet regained communications before landing but not in time to save the mission. Rosetta's Philae lander ended up in a bad spot and couldn't communicate much because of low solar power. Hayabusa had comms trouble when it was supposed to launch from its asteroid, but recovered.
- 7y ago
- spocklivelong 7y agoSilence at the command center? What's happening?
- stronglikedan 7y agoSeems like they lost contact with the lander. (I think - I heard them say they lost contact with "station".) Fucking hair-raising...
- dmix 7y agoAt 400m is was 1km off from the landing site, which you can see on the descent map it's off centre.
- CodeSheikh 7y agoWelcome to the Moon, India!
- randrews 7y agoThey had landed one before, Chandrayaan 1. Edit: but not a soft landing, my mistake.
- abhi3 7y agoNo telemetry data since about 10 minutes starting just as it was about to land. Looks like it didn't make it.
- sp332 7y agoThis is what they've been showing since then: https://imgur.com/a/aYgyGLi https://imgur.com/a/aYgyGLi
- dr_dshiv 7y agoThe look on the faces is not so optimistic
- sp332 7y agoOn this livestream https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcJwjuo8pBo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcJwjuo8pBo a commentator explains that the probe had some autonomy in choosing exactly where to land. So the deviation from the expected course was not necessarily something going wrong. Edit: Apparently it can hover at 400m for up to 90 seconds to image the potential landing site. The loss of communication actually happened before the hovering phase started.
- whatshisface 7y agoYes, and the rotation of the probe resulted in the engine pointing downwards, which means that it may have been intentional.
- dmix 7y agoThey said in the video when they were informing Modi that it was 1km from the original landing site at last reading at 400m.
- wbhart 7y agoUnfortunately it could not have been hovering though. The velocity was almost certainly too high for the spacecraft to handle.
- auslander 7y agoSo ... MCAS again?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- djsumdog 7y agoEveryone in the room looks so worried and sad. No comms since the 1km mark. Damn it Moon! Stop eating our drones!
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- deskamess 7y ago4:42 EST - Some communication between lander and orbiter 4:47 - Official statement => Communication between lander and ground station was lost at 2.1 km altitude. There was no mention of earlier communication between lander and orbiter. Edit: Source: Parroting the Youtube stream (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6VmPU6Us00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6VmPU6Us00)
- captn3m0 7y agorapid unscheduled disassembly, looks like.
- ralusek 7y agoIf you write your schedules in pencil, there's no such thing.
- beiller 7y agoLost comms after landing, suggesting maybe a crash landing. But not all is lost there is still an orbiter where most experiments are supposedly going to run. See https://twitter.com/ChrisG_NSF/status/1170072433115762688?s=19 https://twitter.com/ChrisG_NSF/status/1170072433115762688?s=...
- dmix 7y agoConfirmed on the feed the signal was lost at 2.1km from surface. "The data is being analyzed".
- craigsmansion 7y ago"To continue using TechCrunch and other Oath sites and apps, we need you to let us set cookies to collect your data." No, dear TechCrunch, for you to publish in EU markets you need to obey the fine law. Otherwise, feel free to withdraw, the sooner the better.
- ramk 7y agoThe official news announced by the ISRO chairman on the live broadcast was "the last signal received from the lander was 2.1 KM from the lunar surface. Data is being analyzed as of now". In all probability indicates a crash landing.
- mav3rick 7y agoThis is a dumb question but are telemetry intervals that far apart ? No data was sent in the last 2.1 KMs ? Or something at that level caused systems to fail immediately. Space is hard.
- userbinator 7y agoSpacecraft move very, very fast, and 2.1km is quite a tiny distance in the context of space.
- CydeWeys 7y agoSpacecraft definitely do not move "very, very fast" in the terminal stages of landing, especially not on a low gravity object like the Moon. Apollo 11, for instance, spent several minutes below 2.1km altitude prior to touchdown. Soft landings on the Moon are slow events, and given that telemetry is essentially continuous, something must have gone wrong at around 2.1km. Although the something going wrong could be as innocuous as losing antenna alignment, which happens often during landings even when nothing is really wrong, because the spacecraft is changing pitch to effect the landing. So my best guess would be loss of telemetry due to loss of antenna alignment, followed by a bad trajectory for some reason, followed by unintentional lithobraking.
- CydeWeys 7y agoUpdate: Per Twitter, it seems like something went wrong during the braking burn. The spacecraft was left tumbling (which certainly wouldn't help antenna alignment), and was thus unable to effect its landing burn. No idea yet exactly what caused the tumbling; there's a variety of potential causes.
- ramshanker 7y agoHope is a wonderful thing............. With You ISRO.
- _august 7y agoNYTimes: "India Loses Contact With Chandrayaan-2 Mission During Moon Landing Attempt" https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/06/science/india-moon-landing-chandrayaan-2.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/06/science/india-moon-landin... Edit: NYTimes subtitle says "The country will likely have to wait for a future mission to join the elite club of nations that have landed on the moon." Wikipedia for Chandrayaan-1 says "On 14 November 2008, the [Chandrayaan-1 probe] struck the south pole in a controlled manner, making India the fourth country to place its flag insignia on the Moon" .. huh? Edit 2: Ah, impact landing vs soft landing.
- dmix 7y agoApparently Russia was supposed to build the lander but backed out after one of their other landers crashed, which they were basing the Indian one on. So India built their own. > Although ISRO finalised the payload for Chandrayaan-2 per schedule,[37] the mission was postponed in January 2013[38] and rescheduled to 2016 because Russia was unable to develop the lander on time.[39][40] Roscosmos later withdrew in wake of the failure of the Fobos-Grunt mission to Mars, since the technical aspects connected with the Fobos-Grunt mission were also used in the lunar projects, which needed to be reviewed.[39] When Russia cited its inability to provide the lander even by 2015, India decided to develop the lunar mission independently. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandrayaan-2?oldformat=true https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandrayaan-2?oldformat=true
- rhcom2 7y agoChandrayaan-1 was an impact lander, so it landed on the Moon in a "controlled manner" (ie on purpose). Apparently the lander was painted with the Indian flag[1]. 1: https://web.archive.org/web/20090112054329/http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/ET_Cetera/Tricolours_4th_national_flag_on_moon/articleshow/3714959.cms https://web.archive.org/web/20090112054329/http://economicti...
- exhilaration 7y agoWhat's the point of an impact lantern?
- ben174 7y agohttps://youtu.be/7iqNTeZAq-c?t=3000 https://youtu.be/7iqNTeZAq-c?t=3000 deep link to the point where things went wrong.
- ra7 7y agoThe orbiter is still working fine. So not a complete failure. Better luck next time!
- AareyBaba 7y agoRadio Telescope tracking data show moment signals disappeared https://twitter.com/cgbassa https://twitter.com/cgbassa
- randyk 7y agoLooks like they failed. That does not surprise me. The funds would have been better used to help the suffering millions.
- m0zg 7y agoIMO something like this is a true measure of technological advancement of a nation. This means India is roughly as technologically advanced as the US was 60 years ago, which is impressive by any measure, since space-related things haven't progressed all that much since then. They got super close this time. In a couple more attempts they'll figure it out if they don't run out of money. I hope Modi sees the potential to inspire the nation. For 10 cents per person, inspiring people to take up science is a no-brainer.
- Armisael16 7y agoYou’re saying the Japan is less technologically advanced than the US was in 1966? That seems like a stretch.
- m0zg 7y agoOverall, quite possibly yes. They do consumer electronics quite well, but their space program is a bit of a joke.
- mav3rick 7y agoTheir trains kick the US' ass. So this metric is BS.
- m0zg 7y agoOnly because trains can't be operated at a profit in the US. We build planes instead, which go faster, and make money.
- hodgesrm 7y agoYour statement about trains is not correct. US rail is optimized for transporting goods rather than people and overall does a good job. It is also quite profitable. For example, the Union Pacific 10-K shows a healthy profit for FY 2018. [0] One recent stat I found claimed that in the US 43% of freight travels by rail whereas in the EU it's only 10%. [1] European highways are consequently choked with trucks, something you notice pretty quickly if you drive in countries like Germany. It's easy to overlook, though, when traveling in one of their nice passenger trains. :) [0] https://www.up.com/cs/groups/public/@uprr/@investor/documents/investordocuments/pdf_up_10k_02082019.pdf https://www.up.com/cs/groups/public/@uprr/@investor/document... [1] https://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=11847 https://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=11847
- ptrenko 7y agoIt started tumbling with thrusters on. So when it flipped the probe accelerated towards the ground rather than decellerate.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- auslander 7y agoThey should have open sourced their navigation control codebase, so we can see and fix whatever bugs there are.
- laythea 7y agoWhenever I see India running a space program I always think that its money would be better spent raising the level of society there.
- frequentnapper 7y agohow can one spend money to raise the level of society?