Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

India Loses Contact with Probe Just as It Prepares to Land on Moon

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 297 posts

Re: India Loses Contact with Probe Just as It Prepares to Land on Moon

#281

Post by brij0102 »

sandworm101 wrote: post #219
brij0102 wrote: post #135

What do we think went wrong? I expect maths to be right but there was a comment somewhere about the regolith with fine particles whose specific composition could have caused unexpected dust clouds as the lander sped to the ground ... how was this tech different from the other 3 successes?

Those dust clouds, depending on particle size/composition, could start reflecting radar. Lander then gets confused about its altitude and crashes. This sort of thing makes some areas, the dusty flat ones, potentially more dangerous than others. But they are also flatter and so you don't worry about landing on a rock and tipping over. It's a judgement call.

That would always be a problem though, right? So for unmanned moon landings, do we instead need those inflated bouncy balls? Or did the previous successes just got it right?

Re: India Loses Contact with Probe Just as It Prepares to Land on Moon

#282

Post by brij0102 »

mzs wrote: post #243
brij0102 wrote: post #135

What do we think went wrong? I expect maths to be right but there was a comment somewhere about the regolith with fine particles whose specific composition could have caused unexpected dust clouds as the lander sped to the ground ... how was this tech different from the other 3 successes?

My guess is the attempt at slowing caused it to pitch wildly.

So the algo didn’t account for that or the hardware wasn’t able to compensate?

Re: India Loses Contact with Probe Just as It Prepares to Land on Moon

#283

Post by wtdata »

sbmthakur wrote: post #250
nikhil5 wrote: post #237

I have spent many years in India, and I know that the poorest of its people do not support these kinds of financial adventures (or in this case disasters)

Do all homeless people in developed countries support their respective nation's space program?

Homeless people in developed countries, are in almost every case (perhaps with the exception of the USA, I'm not sure) homeless due to mental issues and because they don't want to go into community housing. They aren't homeless due to a general lack of resources.

Re: India Loses Contact with Probe Just as It Prepares to Land on Moon

#284

Post by naravara »

BurningCycles wrote: post #240
naravara wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>s to your second point—no government today is as large in scope as say Rome, the British Empire, the Persian empire, etc. Utter hogwash. In terms of scale and intensiveness if state powers even small nations can easily outstrip the bureaucratic complexity of any ancient empire. The challenges of maintaining a welfare state is no small thing. And plenty of countries manage incredible amounts of diversity. India has 5…

>And plenty of countries manage incredible amounts of diversity. India has 50 official languages on its own, and that’s ignoring dialects and weird subgroups. Indo-Aryan is spoken by ~74% of India, with Dravidian spoken by ~24% of India. So in practice the real-life language diversity is very small. As for 'managing diversity', India has historically 'solved' this through a caste system, not a solution I would propos…

Those are language families. Not languages.

Re: India Loses Contact with Probe Just as It Prepares to Land on Moon

#285

Post by [deleted] »

MiroF wrote: post #277
DuskStar wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there more genetic diversity in wolves, or in individual breeds of domesticated dogs? I would assume wolves. Does that mean that there are no dog breeds? For that matter, you seem to be conceding the point that there are different groups of people similar to those commonly referred to as "races" that have discernibly different traits - in this case nucleotide diversity. In other words, I do not think that your pap…

The other poster is speaking from the large consensus among biologists whereas you are speaking from/citing...? Should I just presume you to be correct on race unless proven wrong?

[deleted]

Re: India Loses Contact with Probe Just as It Prepares to Land on Moon

#286

Post by DuskStar »

MiroF wrote: post #277
DuskStar wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there more genetic diversity in wolves, or in individual breeds of domesticated dogs? I would assume wolves. Does that mean that there are no dog breeds? For that matter, you seem to be conceding the point that there are different groups of people similar to those commonly referred to as "races" that have discernibly different traits - in this case nucleotide diversity. In other words, I do not think that your pap…

The other poster is speaking from the large consensus among biologists whereas you are speaking from/citing...? Should I just presume you to be correct on race unless proven wrong?

What terms would you prefer to use to describe different clusters of phenotypes? Or do you deny the existence of different clusters of phenotypes in humans?

It doesn't have to be "race", since that's a really loaded word. "Ancestry" and "heritage" seem to be more popular modern equivalents. But do we really use either of those differently than people 100 years ago would have used "race", or are we just powering down the euphemism treadmill?

I really think the main problem in this comment chain is that we're using different definitions and talking past each other.

Re: India Loses Contact with Probe Just as It Prepares to Land on Moon

#287

Post by glofish »

rjf72 wrote: post #280
glofish wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Check out the mid 1200s. The Mongols created a single unified empire than stretched from western europe to eastern asia." The main problem with this argument and others statements similar to it is that we don't have objective evidence for the state of the world in 1200. The information from before cheap printing is heavily biased, mostly hearsay from few individual sources that had their own agenda.

There is extensive evidence beyond even just writings including death records, genetic records (1 in 200 men, around the world, are direct descendants of Genghis Khan), and much more. And when you reach such a tremendous scale there is just an unimaginable amount of writing from people of all different views and values. The argument you're making is sufficient to discount and any all records of history. And indeed no…

My point was that the times you refer to were so underdocumented and the reporting is so unreliable that using them in an argument amounts for confirmation bias. You wrote:

"The Mongols created a single unified empire than stretched from western europe to eastern asia [...] one that was also extremely tolerant of foreign cultures"

Was there a gigantic Mongol empire? Sure. Was it unified and extremely tolerant of foreign cultures in the sense that we use these words today? Not bloody likely. What kind of tolerance leads to what you also note:

"(1 in 200 men, around the world, are direct descendants of Genghis Khan)"

Re: India Loses Contact with Probe Just as It Prepares to Land on Moon

#288

Post by pcnix »

BurningCycles wrote: post #254
hollerith wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying that every speaker of an Indo-Aryan language can understand every other speaker of an Indo-Aryan language?

My understanding is that yes, to a very large extent, since they are dialects of the same language foundation, which is sanskrit and later prakrit.

From personal experience, this is not really true, there are some languages that do maintain some sort of mutual comprehension, but the vast majority in India have no guarantee of that apart from a few choice root words. Speakers of a particular Dravidian language will almost certainly not be able to understand another, and you could make the same argument for Indo-Aryan languages with a very high percentage of success. It's like calling English and French the same language because they have some words that have a similar root. Or even English and German.

Re: India Loses Contact with Probe Just as It Prepares to Land on Moon

#289

Post by newsgremlin »

wtdata wrote: post #283
sbmthakur wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do all homeless people in developed countries support their respective nation's space program?

Homeless people in developed countries, are in almost every case (perhaps with the exception of the USA, I'm not sure) homeless due to mental issues and because they don't want to go into community housing. They aren't homeless due to a general lack of resources.

It's not always a lack of resources but access to resources. They need an address, along with a long waiting list the accommodation they have access to is shared, often with other homeless with said mental health issues. That itself is a scary and a dangerous place to be, they are also targeted by drug dealers that prey on any addictions, trying to get them addicted.

Re: India Loses Contact with Probe Just as It Prepares to Land on Moon

#290

Post by imtringued »

This is a boring comment section. Only the top 40 comments are actually about the space mission. 130 comments respond to the same parent about a world government and the rest of the comments are flagged...

I personally am sad that this mission has failed. Exploring the permanently shadowed craters of the moon is necessary to find whatever sliver of ice remains on it. The satellite industry is growing but there is still no economic case for going to the moon and this mission could have changed that.

Post reply on HN