321–330 of 542 posts
If I read correctly, this is now the most watched live video on YouTube! Congratulations to India and the team on this fantastic feat of an achievement.
Which is disappointing. India should have their own video sharing/livestream platform.
Congratulations India! And everyone. Actually congratulations to all countries still running space programmes including Russia's failure. The more the merrier. This is a stupendously difficult thing to do, India is truly a superpower.
It also ironic that a country and population seen as backwards by the British Empire have overtaken the British in landing on the moon.
Would be nice to see the African and South American continent achieve a moon landing as well.
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On the dark side of the moon?
Not sure if you're joking.. but there's light on the dark side of the Moon, it's just called that because it's never visible from Earth. I assumed the craft that brought the lander into orbit would have some sort of visual tracking, but maybe the distances involved make that impossible and all we get is telemetry + a rendering to visualize it.
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I really wish to see a lander mission to Venus. Doesn't look like anybody other than Russia has done it - that too nearly 40 years ago. The environment is so extreme that the technology - especially electronics - would have to be radically different. The data is also likely to be extremely interesting.
One of the probes from Pioneer Venus 2 (launched by NASA in 1978) briefly sent back data after impacting the surface of Venus. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_Venus_Multiprobe
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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…
There was a NASA project to start developing flight software that's smarter in this kind of way, the Remote Agent. It got an award after flying, but if they continued that line of research I haven't heard about it. https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20000116204/downloads/20...
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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…
Voyager 2 is already recovered, they waited until it was at the best possible (but still wrong orientation) and just yelled at it so that it heard, even with it being misaligned.
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10s of thousands. That has to be some kind of record.
The first launch of SpaceX's Crew Dragon with astronauts on-board holds the record for the most concurrent internet viewers on a stream tracked by NASA at 10 million. Of course if you drop the internet requirement, Apollo 11 still is by far the most live viewed at 600 million viewers.
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Russian space program is a shadow of what it once was. Their history is full of daring missions and extraordinary achievements. I wish they would engage in a space race than in a war.
Might be time for China to reconsider its role with Russia in future manned moon missions. Any prestige the Russian program once had has long since faded, even ground operations at Baikonur are now at risk with equipment being impounded by bailiffs from Kazakhstan to service billions in debt.
The team deserves even more praise to be able to achieve these wins with limited resources.
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> That's probably why they haven't officially straight-up announced the issue. What do you mean by "they haven't officially straight-up announced the issue." ? They did so - several times actually.
Edit:nvm, I'm wrong, see below They've given out vague explanations such as a software glitch, while holding the detailed post-mortem back claiming the obviously absurd excuse of national security concerns. This is counter to how they typically operate as well as how most other agencies/companies around the world operate these days, where they at least explain what went wrong. eg Hakuto-R's team explaining that their…
Chairman S Somanath has given three main reasons that led to the crash-landing of the Vikram lander on September 6, 2019 just minutes before the touchdown.
The ISRO chairman said, “The primary issues were: One, we had five engines which were used to reduce the velocity (called retardation). These engines developed higher thrust. When such a higher thrust was happening, the errors on account of this differential were accumulated over some period. All the errors accumulated, which was slightly higher than what we expected.
When it (lander) started to turn very fast, its ability to turn was limited by the software because we never expected such high rates to come. This was the second issue.
The third reason for failure was the small site of 500m x 500m for landing of the lander.”
Rectifying those mistakes this time, the Isro chairman said, “This time we have kept an area of 4.2 km (along the track) x 2.5 km (width) for the landing site. So, it can land anywhere, so it doesn’t limit you to target a specific point.”
Somanath said “instead of a success-based design, Isro has this time opted for a failure-based design” and focused on what all can fail and how to protect it and ensure a successful landing.
“We looked at sensor failure, engine failure, algorithm failure, calculation failure. So, there are different failure scenarios calculated and programmed inside. We did new test beds for simulation, which was not there last time. This was to look at various failure scenarios,” he explained.
The ISRO chief said the Vikram now has additional solar panels on other surfaces to ensure that it generates power no matter how it lands.