191–200 of 542 posts
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I was surprised they had the propulsion budget for it.
Not only was the Chandrayaan 3 budget lesser than that of Chandrayaan 2, as a meme doing the rounds point out, it was lesser than the budgets of some Hollywood blockbusters like Interstellar. So yeah, safe to say they could have had the budget for more if necessary.
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Goonhilly, Hawaii, but I can't figure out BIK. They're NASA and ESA tracking stations: https://www.eoportal.org/other-space-activities/estrack , https://www.indiatoday.in/science/chandrayaan-3/story/how-is...
If the other 2 are NASA and ESA the other BIK is probably a Russian one.
Firstly - congratulations to the whole team on this achievement I'm also curious - Why the south pole of the moon? does it have an added significance vs other locations on the moon? - Is a landing on the south pole more difficult to achieve? Seems so according to this article: https://www.reuters.com/science/why-are-space-agencies-racin...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_south_pole > It is of special interest to scientists because of the occurrence of water ice in permanently shadowed areas around it. The lunar south pole region features craters that are unique in that the near-constant sunlight does not reach their interior. Such craters are cold traps that contain a fossil record of hydrogen, water ice, and other volatiles dating from the early S…
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Why such a long political speech and no views from onboard camera?
Unfortunately all the national space agencies seem to suffer from this. Both NASA and ESA also seem to think that people are tuning in to watch the smarmy politician talk rather than the robot making its way to space/landing on another body. Had the same issue with JWST for example.
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> seems like such a gross omission. Almost all space mission code only ever has the so-called 'happy path'. We rely on extremely tight mechanical and aerospace engineering tolerances to achieve that happy path. The Hubble Space Telescope's primary mirror grinding was off by a matter of micrometres, and resulted in blurry images. Consider all the Mars rovers. Imagine some wind gust threw the descending module off cour…
When saying "we", do you mean you write code for the space missions? Writing only happy path code as a standard practice in the space sector seems quite absurd. You won't ever achieve absolute precision and errors do happen, yet it seems like systems recover most of the time. Recently, the antenna of Voyager 2 got misaligned, but it is expected to recover from that. That was only the last problem it encountered over…
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> I get the point that the US already put people on the moon I didn't mention the US and I'm not from the US (I'm French). Humanity landed on the moon. Over 50 years ago. If a country today built a 1969 computer I wouldn't marvel at the achievement. And yes, sure, there are probably many instruments on board. But you can tell from the video -- and all the excitement here as well -- that this is mainly political and p…
You can use the “isn’t there anything better to do” towards literally anything Why not this though
I wouldn't care one way or the other but what gets me is we're sold this as a scientific pursuit, while it's obvious it's just nationalistic bombast.
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Looking forward to this. The Moon has been on a role eating landers and space probes lately.
The complexity of landing on the moon is somewhere between that of launching a spacecraft and that of a self-driving car. It's sad that so many landers were lost - it would have been heartbreaking for those who built them. But I hope that they attempt it again and perfect this complex task.