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Chandrayaan-3 Soft-landing [video]

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Re: Chandrayaan-3 Soft-landing [video]

#95

Post by jvm___ »

The_Colonel wrote: post #58
delta_p_delta_x wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

Re: Chandrayaan-3 Soft-landing [video]

#96

Post by dotancohen »

hoseja wrote: post #40
jvm___ wrote: post #12

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…

Incredibly Kerbal vibe. I think something like that happened to me when using MechJeb. (it even has a "land whenever" feature, which it was too late to use at that point)

That is just a testament to the incredible work of the Squad team. The Indian landing is not similar to Kerbal, rather, Kerbal is very very similar to the real experience. Amazing.
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