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So the mission alone is unimpressive in your opinion? If you were to weed out who did this and only focus on the what, would you not have an inch of wonder and applaud the efforts?
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Besides what others said, it gets extra spice from the fact Russia failed to do the same just days ago.
And the BRICS summit is going on right now... What a powerful display of softpower.
Not asking rhetorically but why is this a big deal? Is it because it's going to the south pole? What are some other benefits to be gained from this?
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...
Moon undergoes extreme temperature fluctuations from day to night, resulting in boil off. There are spots on the South Pole that never see sunlight, so it’s our best bet for finding large deposits of water (as ice).
Not asking rhetorically but why is this a big deal? Is it because it's going to the south pole? What are some other benefits to be gained from this?
- 3 by China: All success
- 1 by Japan (along with a rover from UAE): Failed
- 1 by Israel: Failed
- 1 by Russia: Failed
- 2 by India: Previous one failed. This one succeeded
I can see why the entire world would be excited by something like this. I hope that there will be routine landings by different players and that the landing guidance would be perfected.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missions_to_the_Moon#M...
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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…
I believe Chandrayaan 1 has detected water, but not sure if it was the first one to do so
However, the first direct evidence of water vapor near the Moon was obtained by the Apollo 14 in 1971 [0]. A series of bursts of water vapor ions were observed by the instrument mass spectrometer at the lunar surface near the Apollo 14 landing site.
[0]: https://www.planetary.org/articles/water-on-the-moon-guide
Scott Manly has a video on why he thinks the last one failed. It sounds like their landing software didn't have "oh crap, we're way off course, just land wherever". It only had the happy path of "fly to here and land", so when it switched to the landing phase it tried valiently (including flying upside down) to try to fly back to the landing zone, but the landing zone was much further than fuel supplies allowed. Hope…
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I can imagine that this is a HN-bubble thing. Most people would probably get bored from just seeing some live footage.
That is condescending nonsense. Pretty much everybody would prefer to see rocks from outer space than hearing politicians congratulating themselves and the unity of our country.
If the lander flipped over and exploded, it seems nobody would have noticed.