Chandrayaan-3 Soft-landing [video]
https://www.isro.gov.in/LIVE_telecast_of_Soft_landing.html
osivertsson · 2 years ago
80 comments
https://www.isro.gov.in/LIVE_telecast_of_Soft_landing.html
osivertsson · 2 years ago
80 comments
hunglee2 · 2 years ago
fantastic to see India space program. More countries in space, the better
piyushpr134 · 2 years ago
India has a space program since 70s. It has a sent moon missions thrice now, one mars mission and has an upcoming sun probe too. It has a polar orbit launch vehicle which has one of the safest record in the world. Cost wise, it is pretty effective for satellite launched
simion314 · 2 years ago
Server seems to be busy.
pratio · 2 years ago
simion314 · 2 years ago
thx
XorNot · 2 years ago
Looking forward to this. The Moon has been on a role eating landers and space probes lately.
goku12 · 2 years ago
> 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.
Brajeshwar · 2 years ago
Streaming YouTube link https://www.youtube.com/live/DLA_64yz8Ss
saagarjha · 2 years ago
Seems like it's in Hindi. Any links for the anglophones?
delta_p_delta_x · 2 years ago
It's a dual-language telecast. The commentators alternate between Hindi and English, keep watching.
saagarjha · 2 years ago
Ah, I see. Thanks!
shivekkhurana · 2 years ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLA_64yz8Ss
This is in English
achow · 2 years ago
They are alternatively doing in two languages - Hindi and then in English.
saagarjha · 2 years ago
That's the same link.
abhinavk · 2 years ago
They both are the same links.
tarunupaday · 2 years ago
I think they switch between english and hindi every 5 minutes or so.
cyberbolt23 · 2 years ago
Soft-landing.... hope so.
kaycey2022 · 2 years ago
Yeah!! Let’s go!
the-dude · 2 years ago
Does anybody know if we will be watching a simulation or actual footage?
I am asking because the livestream of the last failed moonlanding this year didn't feature a single second of footage. None.
jvm___ · 2 years ago
Why won't the people landing on the moon cater to me?
_visgean · 2 years ago
but seriously why would they not? If they have something nice to show of why not? This is publicly paid project (by indian tax payers) that is political in its nature. Why not show as much as possible?
fractalb · 2 years ago
It's simulation for sure. Would there be sunlight to view it live?
ethbr1 · 2 years ago
Yes. For solar panel purposes they're landing in the lunar day (14 Earth days?).
Edit: At the start of a lunar day, which equals 28 Earth days. (Source: BBC https://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-asia-india-66576580 )
vivegi · 2 years ago
There's no footage from the last one as the lander crash-landed on the surface of the moon.
NASA reported locating the Vikram Lander's debris in Dec 2019: https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2019/vikram-lande...
dotnet00 · 2 years ago
Definitely no footage, at most maybe a picture if it lands successfully.
The only footage we have of any spacecraft landing anywhere other than Earth is either from Apollo or the Perseverance skycrane deployment. If they do have footage, it'll be like the latter, retrieved after the fact.
lionkor · 2 years ago
Thats not accurate, there is "footage" of other spacecraft, such as the first soviet venus lander or so
imglorp · 2 years ago
This one has onboard cameras and there are curated videos from other phases of flight at the OP link.
the-dude · 2 years ago
Thank you, I missed that.
caeruleus · 2 years ago
It was mentioned they were receiving footage continuously. I think when all monitors are shown, in the middle you can discern pictures being rendered.
Edit: They called this out now, it seems those are live pictures.
NKosmatos · 2 years ago
The lander external view is simulation, but they have a camera (Lander Imager Display) looking downwards that is transmitting live photos every couple of seconds (center, top right on the main screen).
suyash · 2 years ago
Though it's disappointing to see simulation, it makes sense as there is no external vehicle to capture the live video and stream it. The lander cameras are showing realistic video though.
In principle, it should be clearly stated which is real and which is sim.
downboots · 2 years ago
can the frames received be stitched into an animation video using some kind of image interpolation algorithm?
NKosmatos · 2 years ago
They did it officially from ISRO: https://twitter.com/isro/status/1694713817916473530
downboots · 2 years ago
Nice . I was wondering about the algorithm
jvm___ · 2 years ago
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.
Hopefully they have upgraded software to just gracefully attempt a landing, and hopefully they won't be off course.
raverbashing · 2 years ago
This applies to general software development but is especially true in this case
While we think "this cannot ever happen" in a lot of cases it can, in ways you did not consider. Both for good and bad
rob74 · 2 years ago
In general software development it's usually not a problem if your program crashes, then you can fix the bug and run it again. If the thing that crashes is a lunar lander however, you should put a bit more effort into covering all the eventualities...
pjmorris · 2 years ago
I really ought to dig up a reference for this, but there are strong echoes from the past here. Margaret Hamilton (who coined the term 'software engineering' and can be seen standing next to a tall pile of green bar printouts of the Apollo software) brought her daughter to work one weekend during the Apollo program and she (daughter) fiddled with the buttons and caused an error condition. Hamilton, based on this, argued that the software should account for the possibility of mistakes. Management's view was that the highly-trained astronauts wouldn't make mistakes. In time, Hamilton prevailed, and was proven correct.
monitron · 2 years ago
If you find a reference (or anyone does), please share. This is too good a story not to be told widely.
Edit: here, at least, is a mention of the thing with her daughter in a Google Blog article: https://blog.google/products/maps/margaret-hamilton-apollo-1...
stuaxo · 2 years ago
Having seen what happens when you let a toddler start randomly pressing stuff on an Android tablet she was spot on, and if anything every environment should be out through this.
extraduder_ire · 2 years ago
The recent japanese lander had something like this happen a while back. The altitude radar noticed a sudden 2km drop in ground-level, and the system assumed it was broken and stopped using that data.
Turns out it just flew over a cliff edge that actually does that. Completely by accident.
jvm___ · 2 years ago
They picked a new landing site late in the program and didn't get the topography near that site, or run enough combinations through the software in test.
oaktowner · 2 years ago
While I worked at Google I once searched for "//this should never happen" in the code base.
It was in there.
A lot.
gora_mohanty · 2 years ago
That might still be OK if that path literally should never happen in normal operation, but us used, e.g., to handle an error, or at least log it, if the impossible happens because the software is deployed in some unexpected configuration
oaktowner · 2 years ago
Yes! Totally agreed.
The_Colonel · 2 years ago
Not considering such a basic error condition seems like a gross omission.
This can't even come from the software engineering, but must be some kind of managerial failure (e.g. we're short on time, but have to report great progress to my boss, so skip this scenario).
xwdv · 2 years ago
It probably wasn’t even the error. It could have been an accumulation of error % on some unbounded input.
delta_p_delta_x · 2 years ago
> 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 course, or a retro-rocket failed because of vibrations.
Writing code for space missions isn't like writing a CRUD app. Developers can't just teleport to a space probe millions to billions of kilometres away to rectify errors and debug running code on the fly.
For the record, the 'failure path' for Apollo 11 was to get the US President to announce to the world that the two astronauts would likely be marooned on the Moon. Apollo 13 very nearly failed, too.
The_Colonel · 2 years ago
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 its very long mission - and it managed to recover from all of those so far!
jvm___ · 2 years ago
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.
jacobwilliamroy · 2 years ago
Wow I can't believe I didn't hear about this. It was all over the news when they broke it, so I figured it would be just as widely reported when they fixed it. It's been almost 3 weeks.
SamBam · 2 years ago
There was definitely a prominent NYTimes story when it was fixed, that's how I heard about it.
stall84 · 2 years ago
Voyager's programming just brings joy to me to think about.. I mean it's the system as a whole (of course) .. but the fact that they've been capable of flying through the environments they have been, using points of light to align themselves, among other things.. for decades .. and recover from incidents.. is just something I marvel at.
abecedarius · 2 years ago
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...
numpad0 · 2 years ago
Trying to hand roll a super robust AI software usually backfires. Emergency mode triggers right in the middle of the happy path and ruins your uh, a day if you're lucky. They know that, even I kinda know that.
taneq · 2 years ago
That can't still be the case these days, can it? Extremely tight mechanical and engineering tolerances are very expensive compared with merely 'very very' tight tolerances, and I'd imagine the difference between the two can be bridged with more intelligent software in place of "gyroscope + clock + maybe PID loop"?
fidotron · 2 years ago
Yeah, this reads like two people defining happy path subtly differently: one is saying the happy path is anything within acceptable strictly defined mission parameters and tolerances, the other thinks it is the sequence of steps that is expected to successfully execute the mission without ever encountering an exceptional situation (which is the conventional software view of the term), but there are exceptional situations which may be covered in the specification of the mission and so “on the happy path”.
In the case the system strays outside mission success parameters then aborting could make sense. The question there looks to be if the success parameters were defined too narrowly - it sounds like an error in specification that prioritizes landing in the required area over the possibility of landing at all.
bregma · 2 years ago
The classic hardware engineering response of "we'll just fix it in software". Turns out fixing things in software is even more expensive because it's just so easy to make changes that a combinatoric number of changes sneak in.
taneq · 2 years ago
Ohhhh yes. I've been on the receiving end of this one. Designing a system which can accommodate higher tolerances on some hardware components through software controls is one thing. Being handed a poorly performing piece of hardware and told to "just fix it in software" is quite another.
astrange · 2 years ago
If you write the failure path, then you also have to ensure it doesn't fire when there wasn't really a failure and do unnecessary heroics.
Same reason you can't program a self driving car to save a person by sacrificing a squirrel. It's just going to run over the squirrel when it didn't need to.
ianburrell · 2 years ago
Apollo 1 landed on the "failure path". Neil Armstrong noticed that the target was a boulder field, took manual control, discovered his new spot had a crater, and finally found level ground. They had low fuel but not dangerously low.
If Apollo 11 had followed the "happy path", they would have crashed and died.
Hubble was also the "failure path". The main mirror was flawed and had to be corrected.
dotnet00 · 2 years ago
That's probably why they haven't officially straight-up announced the issue.
This wouldn't be the first time that a mission failed due to embarrassing failures in basic software practices (eg Starliner's initial software bugs emerging from a lack of integrated testing).
Main difference is that you aren't triggering a billion overly sensitive nationalistic folks when you point out similar embarrassing errors in most other countries' programs. Eg the time NASA lost a probe due to miscommunicated units, the Apollo 1 disaster, the space shuttle disasters, or the tape around the wiring in Starliner, which was intended to be fire retardant actually turning out to be flammable...
Hell, Japan's Hakuto-R also failed because the software's error detection was buggy, and they openly admitted as much without any bluster about how no one but other people with experience writing code for space probes can criticize them.
lenkite · 2 years ago
> 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.
dotnet00 · 2 years ago
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 flight software thought the radar altimeter was malfunctioning when it wasn't, causing it to rely on the IMU and thus it thought the surface was much higher than it actually was.
lenkite · 2 years ago
Might want to update your general knowledge. The ISRO Chief explained this in an interview. It wasn't just passed off as "software glitch" with no explanation.
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.
dotnet00 · 2 years ago
Huh, I missed that, thanks for the info!
8thcross · 2 years ago
There was a JWST doc on netflix; that explained a NASA technique for Points of failure strategy. ISRO may be using similar.
subtra3t · 2 years ago
Writing code for something that flies into space is not nearly as easy as you think it is. Perhaps the next time you write a comment you could first develop the software which you're complaining about first. I'm sure it would be a trivial task for someone of your stature :)
The_Colonel · 2 years ago
I'm not saying it is easy to handle. But this mode of failure could be expected and prepared for. It's not that uncommon that the spacecraft finds itself in a position which was not calculated.
Or, are you saying that it's expected that the mission did not count with this scenario, and that future missions don't need to account for that either?
MPSimmons · 2 years ago
Out of curiosity, how many space programs have you been involved with?
throwaway4220 · 2 years ago
No that’s a bit unfair. ISRO, Israel, and Japan all had reasons for their failures that were mainly technical
sph · 2 years ago
This is the software engineering version of "I am very badass", passing judgement on software at the cutting edge of science, while sitting at home writing React code.
AlbertCory · 2 years ago
In football journalism they call that Monday Morning Quarterbacking.
RajT88 · 2 years ago
In any kind of aggressive manly kind of story, especially involving the military, they're "Keyboard Cowboys".
Or some new ones I've heard kicked around:
- Gravy Seals - 101st Chairborn - Chair Force pilots
...And so on...
silisili · 2 years ago
You're mixing up terms here. Gravy seals is an insult term, used for typically out of shape people who are heavy into gun/militia/i-am-very-badass type culture.
The latter two are just ribbing jokes about the Air Force, from the other branches usually. My old (Army) boss used to tell me to 'take off your air force gloves' if he ever saw me with my hands in my pockets.
AlbertCory · 2 years ago
Not having served (but I did help out on Operation Code for a couple years):
"Chair Force" does sound like something they would say about armchair generals. No?
silisili · 2 years ago
Absolutely. Just pointing out that one is strictly a pejorative, while the others would likely be viewed as 'someone in the airforce.' I think OP was wanting things more of the former, like gravy seals, meal team six, y'all queda, etc.
AlbertCory · 2 years ago
I like y'all queda!
icemelt8 · 2 years ago
I am a React developer and I am in this picture and I don't like it
antran22 · 2 years ago
You are saying "gross omission" like this is some Python script, like they are skipping the else clause for a condition. Imagine trying to land a plane that is flying at Mach 2, with no direct control, only a video feed with 4 seconds resolution, a bunch of sensors and a tank of fuel for retrograde burn to slow you down. Can you even fathom the number of scenarios that can happen. Your application may have 1 happy path and 2 sad path. Here you get only 1 happy path, a few not so happy path where your probe land sideway or just roll down a crater; and the rest of them are every other combinations of your probe's orientation and speed vector and collision location.
Hell, you can run a few thousand simulators for every scenario you can think of during descent, including lost of burner, propellant leak, etc, and then during the actual descent a chip get burnt because of a stray cosmic ray. There will still be somebody on HN call you out for cutting corner.
hoseja · 2 years ago
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)
dotancohen · 2 years ago
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.
franky47 · 2 years ago
So in Scott's words, a "fly safe" subroutine?
m0llusk · 2 years ago
If anything they seem to have overcorrected for this. This landing path stopped with a near hover at around 800m, then a prolonged hover at 150m while the lander scoped the situation, then an extremely slow descent that allowed for corrections the whole way down. Very impressive.
hoseja · 2 years ago
Also incredibly inefficient.
user_7832 · 2 years ago
A lot of things in the world trade inefficiencies for safety.
hoseja · 2 years ago
I was surprised they had the propulsion budget for it.
ansible · 2 years ago
It helps a lot that the Moon's gravity is about 1/6th of Earth's.
devnonymous · 2 years ago
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.
dotnet00 · 2 years ago
I don't think they're referring to literal money, but rather that the lander had enough fuel.
Sharlin · 2 years ago
"Fuel budget", "mass budget", "payload budget", even "delta-v budget" are common terms in spaceflight and refer to how much of a valuable thing a spacecraft can carry given some pesky laws of physics [1], nothing to do with money (except insofar as more money would let you build a bigger spacecraft…)
[1] https://www.kallmorris.com/columns/tyranny-of-the-rocket-equ...
Zigurd · 2 years ago
This is one reason why low cost and efficiency are just a nice-to-have when it comes to to space exploration. Moreso the farther you go. A unique mission like a lunar polar landing should be conservatively engineered, where that is possible, on the first try. Early optimization and space exploration don't mix.
layer8 · 2 years ago
First make it work, then make it right, last make it efficient.
bagels · 2 years ago
It's a lot more efficient than having to send a fourth rocket.
tshaddox · 2 years ago
What numerator and denominator are you using to calculate the efficiency of an unmanned lunar soft landing mission?
hoseja · 2 years ago
The most efficient landing - high impulse reverse gravity turn suicide burn vs. what they did - hovering mid-space two or three times, slowly inching toward ground while fighting gravity.
ansible · 2 years ago
Yes, it was a very conservative landing trajectory. But it is very, very difficult to get a hoverslam right the first time, or the second, or the third...
I did like seeing the live images captured during descent, I also hope those get made into a video and posted online.
Looking forward to the rover deployment too.
rst · 2 years ago
This doesn't seem to have been a hoverslam, though -- the probe was hovering at, I think, 150 meters for quite some time, and then maintained a steady and slow rate of descent while still under power.
ansible · 2 years ago
Yes, Chandrayaan-3 definitely did not performance a hoverslam, the landing was much more conservative than that. With a hoverslam, everything has to go exactly right. A valve that is slightly sticky can be enough to wreak everything.
morepork · 2 years ago
If they have the fuel available, may as well be very conservative. Either burn the fuel on descent or have it sit in the tank forever on the lunar surface.
8bitsrule · 2 years ago
Possibly the lander had a choice to be more careful/picky if the remaining fuel permitted. (Just as Armstrong did.)
seatac76 · 2 years ago
They also had an issue with the thrust gradient it could only do it increments in 20% which was too much of a change this one was finer which allowed for better control authority.
ansible · 2 years ago
Link to the Scott Manley video - The Real Reason Why Chandrayaan 2 Crashed on the Moon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ngVl6iO94c
Rygian · 2 years ago
That's an example of failing to follow the "Aviate, Navigate, Communicate" rule of thumb.
goku12 · 2 years ago
Could you elaborate how that applies here? Communication is out of the question - there's nothing the people on the ground can correct. And the lander apparently failed because it tried to navigate its way back to the designated landing site.
vikingerik · 2 years ago
Communicate wasn't the important part, but you got it in your last sentence. It was trying to navigate over aviate - trying to get to its designated landing spot too hard so that it neglected/failed to stay airborne (spaceborne).
goku12 · 2 years ago
That's much clearer. Aviate > Navigate. Thanks!
dadadad100 · 2 years ago
If you crashed trying to ensure your antenna was optimally oriented then you chose “communicate” over “aviate”. It’s a stretch, but the point is to clearly define your priorities and stick to them, even in a panic
sumodm · 2 years ago
Yes, this seems to be one of the issues. Here is a talk by ISRO Chairman S Somanath at Indian Institute of Science (IISc) about the same and what they added. He goes into details of what went wrong. These are based on my limited understanding. One of the thrusters had an issue and got activated for longer (or may be activation profile of thrusters at its extreme's were different from modeled). They had a narrow landing region selected as final position (even one possible point). So now their control system tried to correct this but the algorithm had a bug and that caused it to be further delayed. At this point the correction required, i.e; thrusters to be activated, was outside the tolerance levels. So finally ended up with 50m/s vertical speed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZ2sNRP1opY&t=1440s
With new one, they did couple of things. Larger area to be selected for landing based on camera input. Escape sequence to more achievable points, if something like this happens again. They increased the tolerance from 10 degrees to 25 degrees and guessing fixed the bug in code. They also did some smoothening of the trajectory for different phases to make it more continuous. I think they also made other changes in engines among other things and a whole host of testing.
publicola1990 · 2 years ago
Also did they use image processing to guide the landing this time? American and Chinese probes seems to use it to do the final phase of soft landing.
perryizgr8 · 2 years ago
They have to, don't they? There's no other way.
JKCalhoun · 2 years ago
They started streaming ... how many minutes now until the landing is expected?
JKCalhoun · 2 years ago
The woman answered my question — 18 minutes until powered descent begins.
yett · 2 years ago
Wow almost 4 million watching already
Ayesh · 2 years ago
5,8 million now. I have never seen _any_ live video with that many views.
thinkingemote · 2 years ago
around 7.3 for the landing
vbezhenar · 2 years ago
When it's going to land anyway?
ethbr1 · 2 years ago
18:04 IST
13:34 BST
08:34 EDT
aprasadh · 2 years ago
4.1 million watching live on youtube. Wow!
JKCalhoun · 2 years ago
5.8 million now.
nullcipher · 2 years ago
8m
sidcool · 2 years ago
A T20 cricket match has 21 million peak views. So still low I would say.
actuator · 2 years ago
More people are interested in sports than space landings, who would have thought
sidcool · 2 years ago
I like the sarcasm, but just wanted to put a perspective on numbers. India has a very different scale when compared to other countries.
dizhn · 2 years ago
People watch sports live because spoilers ruin the experience. There isn't much replay value either - except maybe as highlights.
thyrox · 2 years ago
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?
mmx4332 · 2 years ago
This may not be a popular question, but given the amount of poverty in India, is a space program really the best expenditure?
As a geek, I love the space program.
As a human, I don't think it makes sense given the poverty.
pietro72ohboy · 2 years ago
A nation isn't a singular-minded entity; rather, it comprises diverse citizens who assume various roles and contribute uniquely to global improvement. Just because they've successfully landed a rover on the moon doesn't imply the abandonment of all efforts to alleviate poverty.
Honestly, why does the recognition of India's positive accomplishments always seem overshadowed by the specter of poverty and other challenges? Did the Americans eradicate every societal issue before embarking on their lunar mission? Indians should be proud — this accomplishment is truly remarkable and signifies positive societal strides toward a better collective future. Such achievements ignite hope, and progress is fundamentally built upon hope, regardless of the symbolic origins it might stem from.
dotnet00 · 2 years ago
An alternative perspective to consider, what happens to all the skilled engineers interested in and capable of working on advanced technologies like those intended for space if a country decides to put all other development on hold to singlemindedly focus on eradicating poverty?
What would happen to the next generations of talented potential engineers? What value would there be to pursuing an advanced education? Since obviously a space program isn't the only "luxury" that should be put on hold if poverty exists!
The talent would all leave and the next generations would be less incentivized to pursue the very kinds of careers that help a country develop.
rep_movsd · 2 years ago
Look at the US military budget
https://cdn.cfr.org/sites/default/files/image/2020/12/002_mi...
versus education
https://i0.wp.com/cef.org/wp-content/uploads/slide2-1.jpg
As a human I think you should arrest Elon Musk immediately for misleading advertising and fraudulent claims.
As a human I think the US should open its borders for immigrants from Asia.
As a human I think the US should scrap the petrodollar and licence as much nuclear tech as possible.
dharmit · 2 years ago
Two points I'm aware of:
1. No one has managed to make a landing on the moon's South Pole yet.
2. Since the South Pole doesn't get any sunlight at all, it's believed that there's a possibility of discovering ice/water there.
hoseja · 2 years ago
* bottoms of craters on the South Pole.
Some places there get eternal sunlight instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_of_eternal_light
goku12 · 2 years ago
Assuming that CY3 landed somewhere it gets eternal sunlight, I can see how this can be an issue. Many landers and rovers have horizontal solar panels - they would work as long as the sun is reasonably above the horizon. However, the sun is always going to be near the horizon at the poles. That would not only require the solar panel to be mounted vertically, but also be oriented towards the sun somehow.
mkl · 2 years ago
It's a big deal because India has never landed on the moon before; only three nations have.
goku12 · 2 years ago
This is the first time India soft-landed anything outside of Earth. That by itself is a big deal. Soft-landing guidance on a body without atmosphere is much more complex than launch guidance.
rospaya · 2 years ago
> With this mission, India became the first to impact the Lunar south pole and the 7th nation to reach the lunar surface.
Wiki article for Chandrayaan-1 from 2008.
mkl · 2 years ago
India became the 4th to land successfully with Chandrayaan-3 just now. Others have crashed or deliberately impacted.
goku12 · 2 years ago
Impactors and landers are classified differently. So both your comment and the one you were replying to are correct.
mrphoebs · 2 years ago
Mission to unexplored south pole of the moon and investigating the presence of surface water at the bottom of craters that don't receive sunlight.
Simultaneously capability development and demonstration for ISRO
swader999 · 2 years ago
Aliens. They are out there somewhere.
nuker · 2 years ago
Nah. Escaped nazis.
cpursley · 2 years ago
This was a fun movie (which I assume you're referencing): https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1034314/
The_Colonel · 2 years ago
Besides what others said, it gets extra spice from the fact Russia failed to do the same just days ago.
prennert · 2 years ago
And the BRICS summit is going on right now... What a powerful display of softpower.
sph · 2 years ago
Modi will be soft landing in his chair with a smile at the BRICS summit.
Trias11 · 2 years ago
Agree.
The quicker russians will get rid of putin infestation the sooner this disgrace will end.
rdevsrex · 2 years ago
Lots of people could say the same about Biden or _____ leader.
goku12 · 2 years ago
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.
tjpnz · 2 years ago
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.
goku12 · 2 years ago
Coincidentally, China's first Mars (orbiter) mission Yinghuo-1 failed because it was hitchhiking on the Russian orbiter Fobos-Grunt that failed in an Earth orbit. India launched an orbiter soon afterwards and became the first country to get it right in the first attempt.
ironyman · 2 years ago
Russia retains an (rapidly diminishing) edge in certain areas of space. One of them is engine design. China is still keen on buying the best Soviet engines, namely Energia's RD-170 and its variants but of course Russia is less than keen on parting ways with them.
Even CALT, the major launch vehicle provider in China, admits it will be well into the late 2020s/early 2030s before they can get an engine as good as the RD-170. Their YF-130, while technically very good according to recent tests, is still a bit less efficient. Think about that, a 40 year gap. Aerospace is hard.
chpatrick · 2 years ago
I'm surprised that the Atlas V's first stage has these Russian engines.
dotnet00 · 2 years ago
Using Russian engines, like the ISS collaboration was an attempt by the US to keep soviet rocket scientists in business in civilian roles so they wouldn't be incentivized to spread around the world proliferating ICBM tech.
In the process the US paid a huge price (decay of domestic design capability) and it's debatable if the goal was achieved.
Edit: Thankfully the decay has been made up for over recent years with the boom in private launch companies and of course, SpaceX's work.
chpatrick · 2 years ago
Very interesting, do you know where I can read more about that?
dotnet00 · 2 years ago
This feels like a good writeup untainted by more recent events on the US-Russian cooperation https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/partner...
cpursley · 2 years ago
Not as "cool" as the SpaceX stuff, but Angara, Amur, Soyuz-5, Soyuz-7 are all in the works.
cpursley · 2 years ago
American 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 rather than constant illegal, brutal, destructive and absolutely unnecessary war.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Uni...
dotnet00 · 2 years ago
It isn't really the gotcha you think it is when you see Falcon 9s flying and landing multiple times a week, the most advanced conventional rocket engines ever being mass produced, two scifi-esque lunar landers under serious development and all the other things.
The American space program is far and away the world leader by a huge margin, while almost 2 decades ago things were dicey, the current Ameircan space program is definitely befitting of its glory during the mid/late 19th century.
cpursley · 2 years ago
I agree with everything you wrote. But you missed my point - America has an incredible space program despite their wars. If wars were the cause of space program degradation, Russia would actually be ahead.
dotnet00 · 2 years ago
Ah, yeah not much arguing with that.
goku12 · 2 years ago
I'm not a supporter of war mongering by any country. And what I hoped for Russia is what I hope of the entire world. But the assumption that the impact of their war efforts on their economy are similar is completely wrong. Russian economy is in shambles due to it while America goes on as usual.
cpursley · 2 years ago
This is objectively false, their economy is actually experiencing growth which has been widely reported:
- https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO/Issues/2023/04/11/wo...
- https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.PP.CD?locat...
- https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/double-digit-growth-r...
pbj1968 · 2 years ago
Russian space program started with killing a bunch of cosmonauts they pretended never existed…
goku12 · 2 years ago
They also created a bunch of tech that Americans thought impossible at the time - especially the staged combustion cycle with oxygen-rich preburner. And the American space programme too had its share of human losses due to sheer hubris - the 2 shuttle disasters included and possibly Apollo 1 as well. Let's not understate the achievements of the Russian space engineers and the bravery of their astronauts just because of the current political situation.
numpad0 · 2 years ago
Speaking of that, was that another failure of a modified Fregat or am I just too dumb to speak on this topic?
subtra3t · 2 years ago
- Only 3 other countries have landed on the moon
- Its landing on the south pole where nobody's ever landed before
- Russia failed to land on the moon a week or two back
taneq · 2 years ago
They've made a controlled landing on the moon. Just because it's been done a few times before, ever, doesn't make this a small accomplishment.
ajnin · 2 years ago
This is a big deal because since 1976, only China has (edit: had!) managed to land something successfully on the Moon. And also space exploration is cool in general.
goku12 · 2 years ago
A look at the previous lunar missions [1] should give an idea. There have been 7 lander missions since 1976 (not including impactors):
- 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...
FpUser · 2 years ago
why 1976 is a starting point? Why not counting successful Lunokhod rover missions? Looks like you're trying to to fit facts to narrative.
goku12 · 2 years ago
There was a fervent space race before that. Do you believe that anybody forgot about the countless interplanetary missions before that? Every time someone tries to collect data points, someone like you will start accusing vested interests rather than argue the reasons behind the data.
Edit: Added later:
Consider these questions:
1. Russia's lunar missions were all done in 18 years until Luna 24. Why did they then wait 47 years for Luna 25?
2. The US's last lander mission and manned mission was in 1972 (Apollo 17). Why do they want to restart it again after waiting more than half a century?
Or am I making this up too? The simple fact is that the current lunar missions are undertaken by an entirely new generation. Those from 1976 has long retired. That's good enough to consider them as two separate timelines.
Pidaymou · 2 years ago
Actually 3 by India.
1- was an orbiter: Success
2- Orbiter+ lander&rover: Partial success, orbiter succeed but lander crashed.
3- Lander&rover: Succesful.
contrarian1234 · 2 years ago
I'd be curious if it's at all interesting from a technical perspective. It was impressive in the 60s and 70s because a lot of new things needed to be discovered and understood to make it happen. But now a days.. are there really technical aspects that would not be covered in a typical engineering course?
I get it's very expensive and hence difficult to pull off - but this makes it comes off as mostly nationalism and a big display of disposable income (which for a country with so much poverty is .. something)
legends2k · 2 years ago
Technically no one has landed in the crater ridden South pole on the dark side of the moon. Scientifically it's useful to course these uncharted parts of the moon both for water/ice and mineral composition.
I don't see how poverty comes into play here: every nation had similar issues when they were doing space exploration. They are two unrelated spheres. Solving one doesn't mean the other won't be
albert_e · 2 years ago
The budget with which this mission was accomplished is something.
Less than a typical hollywood movie budget.
robgibbons · 2 years ago
Less even than some Bollywood movie budgets.
phanimahesh · 2 years ago
The money used on these programmes doesn't burn up, it gets recirculated. As an Indian I consider this a pretty good use of tax payer money.
contrarian1234 · 2 years ago
It's a common perspective. My personal experience (working in the defense sector) is that these kinds of endeavors end up tieing up a lot of very smart doing vanity projects that in effect don't "generate value" for society. All the people involved wouldn't just be sitting on their hands if the moon project didn't exist. But I guess it could be worse.. they could be working on moving money around or pushing ads on to people
z3phyr · 2 years ago
A lot of poor people were genuinely happy and inspired today.
luminati · 2 years ago
Sorry to say but no contrarian thought in your comment.
dotnet00 · 2 years ago
What typical engineering course covers the design of reliable systems which work mostly autonomously in environments with huge temperature variations, vacuum, inaccessibility for repair, significant radiation, mass constraints, sensor limitations etc?
Designing stuff for space involves a lot of challenges that typical engineering does not.
Plus, while the US and USSR may have done the necessary technical work, India doesn't get most of that knowledge and thus has to learn the lessons itself.
wheelerof4te · 2 years ago
We get to see more images of the Moon's surface. In a previously unexplored region.
How is that not a big deal?
the-dude · 2 years ago
Am I mistaken or do they have an onboard view in the command center, but are not showing us?
mkl · 2 years ago
They are showing it sometimes, with a camera pointed at that screen - the one to the left of the big numbers with velocities. There's also a simulated view that shows the surface (the second big screen from the left).
reaperducer · 2 years ago
One of the clocks is labeled "IST," which I assume means India Standard Time.
Another clocks are labeled "GHY," "HAW," and "BIK." What do they indicate?
jvm___ · 2 years ago
GHY is probably https://www.goonhilly.org/
So, likely the current time at the location of the radio antennas they're using to communicate with the lander.
mkl · 2 years ago
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...
user_7832 · 2 years ago
Fwiw the esa time is the same as Amsterdam Time (cest, get +2)
dmix · 2 years ago
If the other 2 are NASA and ESA the other BIK is probably a Russian one.
varshar · 2 years ago
Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan
fakedang · 2 years ago
Nice catch. It's definitely Baikonur.
dmix · 2 years ago
Thanks :)
ray02398 · 2 years ago
Likely Biak (Indonesia), from https://www.spacetechasia.com/isro-visits-indonesias-space-a...
“ISRO and LAPAN have had a long history of collaboration, with ISRO owning a ground station on the Indonesian island of Biak, which has supported many of India’s launches.”
jhalstead · 2 years ago
I'm not very familiar with this source [0], but it states "ESA was providing support to the Chandrayaan-3 mission from three of its ground stations located in Kourou (French Guiana), Goonhilly (United Kingdom), and New Norcia (Western Australia)." Although BIK doesn't obviously map to any of those.
[0] http://www.moneycontrol.com/news/india/chandrayaan-3-europea....
mendigou · 2 years ago
It's a station from DLR in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan: https://www.dlr.de/eoc/en/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-5287/102...
mkl · 2 years ago
Confirmed: https://landsat.usgs.gov/historical-international-ground-sta...
drones · 2 years ago
Currently in a live server with others watching and it's a lot of fun. I happen to know many people working in the space industry, and a lot of great engineers come from India. Very happy and excited for India and its people. Goodluck!
edit: lets goo!!!
mdrzn · 2 years ago
Successfully landed! Great job!
confuseddesi · 2 years ago
It’s landed! Congratulations to India on this great achievement!
pipo234 · 2 years ago
Congrats to India!
user_7832 · 2 years ago
It’s brilliant! I think most Indians were really disappointed after the last failure, so it’s really reassuring that despite shooting further we were successful!
bandyaboot · 2 years ago
Just makes success that much sweeter. Well done India!
ojosilva · 2 years ago
If you may: The peacock has landed! (Indian national bird)
illegalmemory · 2 years ago
I can see little kids waving flags and celebrating in my housing society! in 100s! Such a great feat and congratulations
whoknowswhat11 · 2 years ago
Why such a long political speech and no views from onboard camera?
hoseja · 2 years ago
You can see the onboard camera view in the background sometimes. And the only truly hard thing about this is getting the political will for the funding, so.
whoknowswhat11 · 2 years ago
Is it still updating? Was hard to tell. But just 30 seconds of that would be great
hoseja · 2 years ago
Actually not sure, the last image I caught didn't look particularly "landed".
ape4 · 2 years ago
So many words about "success" - how about some goodies?!
(To be clear, I am happy for India, just think it could be presented better)
whoknowswhat11 · 2 years ago
Right - they had a great camera running - let’s enjoy a few rolling frames of the same spot showing touchdown area and systems working
shri_krishna · 2 years ago
> Why such a long political speech
ISRO is primary arm of the Department of Space which is headed by the Prime Minister. So in essence, the Prime Minister is the boss. It is not an independent federal agency like NASA.
factorialboy · 2 years ago
If my understanding is correct, did the PM in his speech promise to fund a future mission to Saturn?
shri_krishna · 2 years ago
I am sorry I did not pay close attention to his speech. But in the subsequent speech, I think the ISRO chief did talk about a Venus Orbiter Mission.
shubhamkrm · 2 years ago
IIRC, he mentioned missions to the Sun, Venus and a manned space mission.
goku12 · 2 years ago
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.
basementcat · 2 years ago
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
goku12 · 2 years ago
That's an interesting outcome! Thanks!
dotnet00 · 2 years ago
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.
whoknowswhat11 · 2 years ago
That was very memorable- grainy photos projected on a wall while nasa admin (old white guy) briefed Biden? Jwst had a pretty well planned out program for first images including events and it just got crushed.
sva_ · 2 years ago
I can imagine that this is a HN-bubble thing. Most people would probably get bored from just seeing some live footage.
Philip-J-Fry · 2 years ago
SpaceX livestreams didn't get super popular for having a politician on them. They got popular for showing exactly what's happening with enthusiastic presenters narrating it.
Most people find speeches and politicians boring. They wanna see rockets flying, robots moving, etc.
rqtwteye · 2 years ago
“enthusiastic presenters narrating it.”
I seriously hate their narrators and all the cheering.
ethbr1 · 2 years ago
Last I heard, their narrators were regular SpaceX employees with day jobs. So somewhat understandable they have an emotional stake in mission success.
sph · 2 years ago
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.
worldsayshi · 2 years ago
Yeah it's more likely this is a case of wants of decision makers being prioritized over wants of the audience. This event is an avalanche of prestige. Of course politicians want to soak it up.
sriku · 2 years ago
Nope. Same reaction from a wide variety of people including my wife who's not in tech and doesn't know what HN or YCombinator are. She was like "let the team speak already!"
ismayilzadan · 2 years ago
You wife probably a highly educated person sharing similar views in life like you
mcpackieh · 2 years ago
So what you're saying is you'd need to be an uneducated imbecile to prefer politicians speaking to live space footage.
I think you're selling uneducated imbeciles short; surely even they prefer the space footage. Only the politicians doing the speaking prefer themselves.
Eddygandr · 2 years ago
SpaceX livestream much more mundane things with tens of thousands of viewers
daveguy · 2 years ago
10s of thousands. That has to be some kind of record.
dotnet00 · 2 years ago
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.
daveguy · 2 years ago
That makes sense for Apollo 11. I expect that one won't be beat until we land people on Mars. I figured SpaceX had some much bigger viewerships than 10's of thousands. (I've watched several myself.) That number must have been on the more (now) regular things like vertical landing the same rocket for the Nth time! Thank you for the update.
Eddygandr · 2 years ago
Not at all! Although some of them will be people like me having it on the side monitor day dreaming while they write CRUD :)
pyeri · 2 years ago
On the other hand, political speeches on such occasions go down as most remembered historically. The infamous quote "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." was obviously said by some politician! (or at least with non-technical motives)
flavius29663 · 2 years ago
Also, "we're going to the moon not because it's easy, but because it's hard"
ethbr1 · 2 years ago
The full version of that section is more amusing but forgotten
>> But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may as well ask: why climb the highest mountain? Why 35 years ago fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? We choose to go to the moon {applause} We choose to go to the moon... {applause} We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard -- because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills -- because that challenge is one we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win. (And the others too)
(as spoken and delivered at Rice University in Houston, Texas, referencing the Rice-Texas American football rivalry, where Texas is a 10x larger university)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QXqlziZV63k&t=9m22s
https://www.jfklibrary.org/sites/default/files/archives/JFKP...
Congratulations to ISRO (and all of India) for doing not the thing that was easy, but the thing that was hard and valuable!
dotnet00 · 2 years ago
They want to go down in the history books the way JFK's "we choose to go to the Moon" did without experiencing the "mind-blowing" event afterwards that made the speech historical.
granularity · 2 years ago
Here's the actual story about that quote: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Armstrong#First_Moon_walk
adolph · 2 years ago
> The infamous quote "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."
What makes the quote infamous rather than just famous?
ryandrake · 2 years ago
Unless you were being sarcastic, it's because people don't know what the word infamous means and think it means "extremely famous".
adolph · 2 years ago
No sarcasm, just wondering. Armstrong could have been cancelled or something. I might have missed the Two Minutes Hate [0] when he or lunar exploitation was on.
renewiltord · 2 years ago
Could just be a misuse of infamous but could just as well be intended to refer to the fact that Man and Mankind mean the same. You need an article in front to transform "One small step for Man" into "One small step for a man" to refer to Neil himself stepping.
veonik · 2 years ago
"One small step for a man" is what he actually said, I think, or so I've heard. Apparently the "a" was lost due to radio interference.
bluGill · 2 years ago
Wikipedia (see elsewhere for link) has good coverage of that. "A" was intended to be said, but when humans say lines like that it is common to miss a word here and there. There is no way to know for sure if he said it and the technology of the time didn't pick it up, or if he misstated his own quote.
firebat45 · 2 years ago
It's like flammable and inflammable. They mean the same thing and nobody knows why we have different words for it.
At least, this is my head-canon.
pyeri · 2 years ago
Exactly! This has been my own head canon too since like decades! I was actually surprised to read in this thread that "infamous" is a negative interpretation of famous which seems like a revisionist and recent interpretation. The English language also evolves through the ages and so do the meanings and interpretations.
georgeecollins · 2 years ago
I think it is a sign of habitual cynicism that you assume "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." was said by a politician. I think people feel like they are defending themselves from being manipulated by not accepting anything on its face as sincere. Sometimes a pipe is just a pipe.
lioeters · 2 years ago
I think the saying goes, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. And knowing Freud, you know it's not just a cigar.
georgeecollins · 2 years ago
That's correct about Freud! I was referring to Magritte, who made the painting "Ceci n'est pas une pipe." By which he meant the image of the pipe was not actually not a pipe. Which means .. well I think you would have to read about it and I am not sure I am using the reference in the right way.
I believe Freud and the cigar is about our thoughts and impulses sometimes not having greater meaning in our subconscious. Magritte is about something different.
zapdrive · 2 years ago
To his credit, Narendra Modi has increased ISRO's budget a lot. Many years they have received more than promised! So he kind of deserves to rake in the limelight.
DiggyJohnson · 2 years ago
It's also because these agencies are reliant of politicians and government institutions for funding. So there is a balance between "showing what the public actually cares about" and "keeping this guy happy so we can keep up funding / congressional support / etc."
sirius87 · 2 years ago
I believe the chairman of the space agency also used the Prime Minister's mention of future projects to note it as confirmation that those projects will indeed happen i.e. be funded. That was pretty smart at @ 01:07:00 in the video.
So it's good to see it work both ways.
layer8 · 2 years ago
Because the whole endeavor was financed for its political impact.
samstave · 2 years ago
They dont want us to see the little green UAPs that closely monitor what we are doing :-)
jp42 · 2 years ago
I absolutely agree that they should immediately release data & images for more technically inclined section. However the reason for speeches is entire nation is watching this event across all age group, most of them don't understand technical things, I would say even image of moon surface wont connect to most of them. Basically speeches is the way to connect & artists impression images. To give some example, people thing entire rocket goes to moon, one of the politician was wishing "passengers" on the spacecraft, reputed news channel claiming "breaking new" that there wont be delay in landing as if we can push breaks like in car or traffic on the way. So you get the point, to connect to masses they are speaking in language that everyone understand
stall84 · 2 years ago
The whole Prime Minister thing was bizarre to me .. He was like on the mission-control screen with his own panel .. it was just weird lol.. Even in the US where our presidents fancy themselves god's.. it still just had a weird perception from my point of view..
But I'm proud of the people that worked on and executed that mission for them. Obviously a moment of immense national pride, well deserved.
__void · 2 years ago
very good, congratulations on the achievement!
hojinkoh · 2 years ago
Congratulations to India!
zerojames · 2 years ago
Congratulations to India! Every time I read of launches to space, I think (and sometimes say aloud) "wow!" It is awesome in the traditional sense of the world.
kordlessagain · 2 years ago
Now it needs to find the alien base hidden at the South Pole! All joking aside, great work by this team!
mrtksn · 2 years ago
One of the most populous countries has become a strong contender in space exploration. Hopefully, it will inspire so many more Indians to push it further and elevate the humanity, just like USA and USSR once did. It's great.
samstave · 2 years ago
They dont want us to see the little green UAPs that closely monitor what we are doing :-)
hackernewds · 2 years ago
Also here come the British news lamenting about how India is wasting money instead of focusing on their poor. Slumdog Millionaire mentality.
mcpackieh · 2 years ago
NASA often gets the same treatment, particularly so during the Apollo program when they were getting a lot of money. It doesn't matter the country, a lot of people don't see the sense in spending a single pence on space.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/jul/14/apollo-11-ci...
somenameforme · 2 years ago
One of my favorite quotes is, "When a wise man points at the moon the imbecile examines the finger." So pertinent, but also with so absurdly much imagery, symbolism, and metaphor packed into just a few words. But perhaps the most remarkable thing is that that quote's 2500 years old. Technology changes so much, but we largely seem to be the exact same people we were even thousands of years in the past.
GordonS · 2 years ago
Also the British news when money is spent on the poor: "Scamming Scavs with 17 Kids Showered with Tax-Payer's Money".
Most British news outlets really are a scourge on our society.
ipunchghosts · 2 years ago
it landed sucessfully!
mathieuh · 2 years ago
Wait did it land while they were showing us Modi's face? Why didn't they show the camera feed?
blackoil · 2 years ago
:) You know the answer.
BtM909 · 2 years ago
They showed the animation. Maybe in case something went wrong, they didn't want to broadcast that?
wheelerof4te · 2 years ago
Why? No transparency at all. Show me the images and the video of the Moon.
Every kid today can create an animation.
subtra3t · 2 years ago
Maybe you were lagging? PM Modi's face wasn't displayed at the exact moment it landed, but it was shown before and after that moment.
mzs · 2 years ago
No, the feed on the right switched to the animation from the lander's view at 19m above the surface.
throwaway_0823 · 2 years ago
The guy is a megalomanic. The ISRO official who announced the successful landing even asked Modi to "bless us"! No doubt a diktat from Modi.
shri_krishna · 2 years ago
> The guy is a megalomanic
The Prime Minister is the head of Department of Space, whose primary arm is ISRO. He is the boss. Literally every Prime Minister of India has attended ISRO launches and addressed ISRO after success/failure of launches.
> asked Modi to "bless us"
You probably aren't Indian but this is quite common in India where we seek blessings from elders.
throwaway_0823 · 2 years ago
> He is the boss.
No, he's just an elected representative of the people, a government servant.
> You probably aren't an Indian
I am an Indian.
Modi, desperate to project himself, is overruling the President (who is the supreme commander of the armed forces), gotten himself "coronated" in the new Parliament building, gotten his picture put on every citizen's COVID vaccination certificate (as if he has invented the vaccine).
shri_krishna · 2 years ago
> No, he's just an elected representative of the people, a government servant.
And he still is the boss of DoS whose arm is ISRO. You can cry all you want, it won't change facts.
> Modi, desperate to project himself, is overruling the President (who is the supreme commander of the armed forces), gotten himself "coronated" in the new Parliament building, gotten his picture put on every citizen's COVID vaccination certificate (as if he has invented the vaccine).
Nonsense.
mauryashivam · 2 years ago
He has to put his face on all positive news coming from the country. Anyways happy for ISRO and a step in better understanding Moon (chanda mama).
goodbyesf · 2 years ago
> No, he's just an elected representative of the people, a government servant.
Yes. The elected leader is the boss of the executive branch of government. One doesn't negate the other.
mzs · 2 years ago
PM is not the boss of the executive according to the constitution*. The fact that traditionally and more recently the President follows the whim of the PM does not negate the text that identifies the elected President as the head of the executive.
shri_krishna · 2 years ago
> identifies the elected President as the head of the executive.
Wrong. He is a "nominal head", or in other words, "in name only". The powers are vested in the Prime Minister not the President. So it does not make him the head of the executive. Read Article 53 (3)a of Indian Constitution which overrides 53(1) and resolves any ambiguity: https://indiankanoon.org/doc/1597349/
(3) Nothing in this article shall (a) be deemed to transfer to the President any functions conferred by any existing law on the Government of any State or other authority;
So the authority of Prime Minister, as defined by the Constitution, cannot be transferred to the President, even though he is a nominal head. This is as per 53 (3)a.
Article 74(1) further cements this: https://indiankanoon.org/doc/1951021/
"(1) There shall be a Council of Ministers with the Prime Minister at the head to aid and advise the President who shall, in the exercise of his functions, act in accordance with such advice: Provided that the President may require the council of Ministers to reconsider such advice, either generally or otherwise, and the President shall act in accordance with the advice tendered after such reconsideration"
Which means the President can only ask for advice (from PM + Council of Ministers) to be reconsidered, and after reconsideration, he still has to act on the advice. He cannot overrule it. Hence why a Bill can be passed by Parliament and sent back by President to be reconsidered only once. The second time the Bill is sent, the President is duty bound to assent else he can be impeached. The Prime Minister on the other hand cannot be impeached. The ruling Government can be brought down with a no-confidence motion or if enough members from ruling party defect. No other way to impeach a Prime Minister.
Also read Article 77:
77. (1) All executive action of the Government of India shall be expressed to be taken in the name of the President.
It is pretty clear that he has no "real" executive powers and is head in "name" only as the Government is taking actions in his name. The executive power rests with Government of India whose head is the Prime Minister.
It is also even more undermined by the fact that the President is not directly elected by the people (like in US where people vote for the President and representative votes are cast through their electoral college) but through an electoral college consisting of the elected representatives of the People. He has no real executive powers vested in him unlike the President of USA who can pass executive orders.
Tell me one executive order passed by President of India directly and unilaterally. There are none.
oxygen_crisis · 2 years ago
I can't think of any other space mission that devoted one of the control room screens to projecting the head of state's face throughout the landing...
shri_krishna · 2 years ago
That might have been an issue with the control room getting the timing of the live feed wrong. No reason to read into it more than that. We have had previous missions where the Prime Minister's live feed was beamed after the event concluded
seatac76 · 2 years ago
The speech after had a weird order I was expecting ISRO to speak first, thought that was not needed but idk
shri_krishna · 2 years ago
seatac76 · 2 years ago
I cracked up at the little flag waving by who I assume was the prime minister/president. The duality is interesting serious Indian scientists doing great work and a politician on the screen for no good reason. Here’s to the tribe of scientist prevailing and taking the country forward, prob true everywhere now that I think of it.
shri_krishna · 2 years ago
> The duality is interesting serious Indian scientists doing great work and a politician on the screen for no good reason
One can say the same about President Nixon talking to the Astronauts who landed on the Moon. At least here ISRO comes directly under the Prime Minister of India while NASA does not come under the President of USA.
seatac76 · 2 years ago
Ah I see. Did not know that.
captn3m0 · 2 years ago
It landed! Yay!
vidanay · 2 years ago
YAAAAAAAYYYY!
BtM909 · 2 years ago
And we have touchdown!
yogrish · 2 years ago
Chandrayaan-3, Successfully Soft landed. Amazing feat by ISRO. Kudos to all engineers behind this.
dotancohen · 2 years ago
Landed successfully!
Ayesh · 2 years ago
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.
manojlds · 2 years ago
I thought it was 8M earlier. I didn't see this cross 6M though.
rocknor · 2 years ago
It definitely crossed 8M, but not sure if it crossed the previous highest (Felix Baumgartner freefall) which is also around 8M.
goodbyesf · 2 years ago
> If I read correctly, this is now the most watched live video on YouTube!
Which is disappointing. India should have their own video sharing/livestream platform.
nexuist · 2 years ago
I mean, it's video streaming, it's not as easy as rocket science and orbital dynamics.
Sohcahtoa82 · 2 years ago
Why?
goodbyesf · 2 years ago
Economic development? Control over your own media? Surely this is not a serious question. Heck, controlling your own media and tech stack is far more important to a country like india than landing probes on the moon. Ideally india should do both. Not sure why they are lagging so far behind in the tech sector when so much of the tech industry is powered by indians.
vivegi · 2 years ago
Landed successfully at the Lunar south pole area.
haunter · 2 years ago
Narendra Modi has landed on the Moon!
herunan · 2 years ago
His face was bigger than the landing feed!
yett · 2 years ago
Did the successful landing just crash Hacker News?
drones · 2 years ago
yeeep
user_7832 · 2 years ago
Haha also wondered the same
actuator · 2 years ago
Congratulations to ISRO! Hopefully some interesting data and findings come from it and then Gaganyaan next!
risfriend · 2 years ago
Congratulations! Huge feat.
calin2k · 2 years ago
"India is now on the Moon" PM Modi
singularity2001 · 2 years ago
"the sky is not the limit" if I heard correctly
ignoramous · 2 years ago
Talk about perks given the absence of the post colonialism visa regime at the Moon, yeah?
fractalb · 2 years ago
Congratulations to all the engineers and technicians involved. Looking forward to some interesting findings by the rover.
the-dude · 2 years ago
I saw the onboard camera show movement after the celebrations started. Did anyone else see this?
The onboard has not been shown since.
dirkc · 2 years ago
This happens a lot to me in KSP, the lander tends to slide all the way to the bottom of the slope. Most of the time it's okay, just need to tweak the dampeners on the landing legs a bit ;)
EDIT: I went to re-watch the moment on youtube and it does seem like the lander moves slightly to the left!
shivdeepak · 2 years ago
That's probably because the image data being larger than the on-board sensor data would take longer to reach earth, thus the latency.
the-dude · 2 years ago
Obviously I am not a golfer, but I would have waited until the onboard stabilized, sensors be damned.
goku12 · 2 years ago
The sensor data is a reliable low-entropy indicator. The engines are probably cutoff based on the same data (most probably a set of load sensors on the legs). If the data indicates that the engine has cutoff, the craft is stationary and if the data is still streaming, then it's a pretty good indicator that it worked as expected. I would trust it more than the video - especially when the video is lagging heavily.
PS: I have worked extensively on something related. Video is good to have and helps in post-flight analysis. However, it can also mislead sometimes. Sensor data gives you a much clearer initial picture.
bobosha · 2 years ago
congrats ISRO and India for this great achievement.
singularity2001 · 2 years ago
30 minutes of happy faces but not a single broadcast image of the lander.
distcs · 2 years ago
Can someone help me understand this Wikipedia article section: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandrayaan_programme#List_of_...
Check the row for Chandrayaan-2. Why does it say Unsuccessful landing but main mission success and extended missing ongoing?
What exactly are main mission and extended mission and how can they succeed or be ongoing when the landing has been unsuccessful?
mryall · 2 years ago
The Chandrayaan-2 mission had an orbiter, which is still operational, as well as the lander which crashed.
srnayak · 2 years ago
Chandrayaan 2 had 3 payloads. The lander crashed along with rover. But the orbiter is still functioning. It has 8 scientific instruments on board for various observations of lunar surface.
TuringNYC · 2 years ago
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...
dougmwne · 2 years ago
Possible water which would be a giant resource for a permanent presence.
ceejayoz · 2 years ago
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 Solar System
actuator · 2 years ago
I believe Chandrayaan 1 has detected water, but not sure if it was the first one to do so
abhayhegde · 2 years ago
The definitive discovery of Moon water came from Chandrayaan-1 which carried with it a NASA-provided science instrument called the Moon Mineralogical Mapper—M3 for short—that observed how the surface absorbed infrared light. Using this data, M3 determined that previously suspected water molecules were ice inside the Moon’s polar craters [0].
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
firesteelrain · 2 years ago
NASA LCROSS confirmed it before the Indian mission (which NASA instruments also on the Indian mission confirmed first). After NASA confirmed, Indian officials came out with their own announcement
pavon · 2 years ago
Chandrayaan 3 landed at around 69 degrees south latitude which isn't far enough south to access the permanently shadowed craters where large ice deposits might occur (and the Pragyan rover uses solar panels for power).
I haven't read specific reasons for choosing that site, but we have never landed that far south, and it will be interesting to see what differences (if any) there are from the more central latitudes, which is a good enough reason on its own.
Tagbert · 2 years ago
It may be due to communications problems if a lander came down in one of those shadowed craters. We would not be able to communicate with it. it would probably require relay satellites around the moon to mediate that communication.
ganteth · 2 years ago
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).
Symmetry · 2 years ago
The ice would also be pretty close to the Moon's peaks of eternal light[1] where you don't have to have your solar panels spend half of every month in darkness. So basically where you'd want to live on the Moon if you had to pick somewhere.
WorldMaker · 2 years ago
Isn't that also related to why the Lunar Gateway (the proposed space station component of the current Artemis project at Nasa) was proposed to be in a lunar polar orbit?
szundi · 2 years ago
You can easily reach every spot froma polar orbit as the moon rotates under your orbit
russdill · 2 years ago
It's 69° south, so it's not so much the south pole as the polar region. For reference, the major landmass of Antarctica starts around that point on Earth. McMurdo Station is at around 78° South.
psychphysic · 2 years ago
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.
fnordpiglet · 2 years ago
In science and exploration the only losers are the ones who don’t try to begin with.
darkclouds · 2 years ago
Here Here.
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.
BossingAround · 2 years ago
Apologies for the OT, but it's "hear hear", not "here here" [0].
darkclouds · 2 years ago
My hearing is gone, I forgot about it.
yumraj · 2 years ago
> It also ironic that a country and population seen as backwards by the British Empire have overtaken the British in landing on the moon.
This is not the moment to go there, but still since we're on the topic, current leaders of Britain (Prime Minister), Ireland (Taoiseach) and Scotland (First Minister) are all of Indian-Subcontinent origin. Britain and Ireland have leaders of Indian origin, while Scotland has of Pakistani origin.
darkclouds · 2 years ago
I think its good, but they are poisoned chalice jobs and smacks of virtue signalling.
alephnerd · 2 years ago
Sunak and Yousaf are both Punjabi, Sunak's family was from Gujranwala region in Pakistani Punjab before partition and Yousaf's is from Khanewal in Pakistani Punjab as well, plus both are the children of East African Indians who moved to the UK during the mass expulsion of South Asians in the 1960s and 70s (Freddie Mercury is also part of that community as well, though ethnically Parsi Gujarati). Also, they both attended elite Grammar Schools, so they were within the same Old Boys network.
They're much closer culturally than Varadkar who's dad's side of the family is from Konkan region (the coastal region stretching from Goa to Mumbai/Bombay)
f6v · 2 years ago
There’s a novel Artemis by Andy Weir where Africa became the place to launch transports to the Moon. I’d happy for them if they managed to turn things around.
parthdesai · 2 years ago
Just wait till BBC decides to throw a fit about it again
Symbiote · 2 years ago
Note Britain is the third-largest contributor to the European Space Agency, and has a fairly large space industry (satellites, instruments etc).
(The Beagle 2 lander which crashed into Mars in 2004 was managed from Britain.)
darkclouds · 2 years ago
Stevenage produces tiny satellites, but as long as prices are jacked up, anyone can claim its a big industry. Mr Pillinger is a lovely bloke, but firing a giant zorb ball onto a distance planet or moon, isnt exactly rocket science is it?
Artistry121 · 2 years ago
Interesting how close politicians are with anything related to the moon. Nixon on TV as much as the astronauts in 69, Modi on TV here. Both during massive consolidations of power towards the leaders who also have major corruption scandals.
the-dude · 2 years ago
If the lander flipped over and exploded, it seems nobody would have noticed.
robofanatic · 2 years ago
That is exactly what happened last time during Chandrayaan 2. ISRO noticed and fixed the issue and launched Chandrayaan 3
balozi · 2 years ago
I don't know much about landing extraterrestrial missions, but I would imagine that the moment of touchdown is exactly the moment everyone in the control room should be keenly paying attention to their assignment instead of jumping up to celebrate (or at least try not to distract those that are). Because if that thing sunk into a pool of moon water or landed on top of another lunar lander, it would be 15 minutes before anyone realized. Just a minor layman observation.
Anyhow congratulations to this team and to the people of this great nation.
goku12 · 2 years ago
They would have a loss of telemetry that screams of failure. I don't see the possibility that they wouldn't notice.
kumarvvr · 2 years ago
As an Indian, I feel elated to show one more feather in Indias cap, as an inspiration to my son.
zabana · 2 years ago
I wonder what else India could potentially achieve if they could retain their top talent.
Congrats !
codegeek · 2 years ago
Don't think of Brain Drain as a lose lose situation. Lot of Indians who leave India contribute in many ways and in fact bring tons of knowledge and skills from the global world back to India (even if they don't live there physically). Not to mention that amount of money that is exchanged by Non Resident Indians (also known as NRIs).
It is good that Indians are able to go aboard and bring a globalized knowledge back to India.
soligern · 2 years ago
It’s going to be very hard to brain drain a country of 1.4 billion people. That doesn’t even take into account the massive amount of money the diaspora sends back. The above is usually an argument people make when they don’t want to let immigrants into their country.
anovikov · 2 years ago
It went so cleanly it almost made an impression of being easy. Congrats!
underdeserver · 2 years ago
The applause for the successful landing starts at 44:50 (take a few seconds' buffer).
robofanatic · 2 years ago
Great achievement! Space is incredibly hard as they say. Hope ISRO continues with this momentum and achieves more success in its future missions!
nothrowaways · 2 years ago
What would happen if they found water?
hdesh · 2 years ago
They might take a quick shower first. It was a long journey.
robofanatic · 2 years ago
this joke would fly on reddit not here.
blackoil · 2 years ago
Nestle will buy SpaceX!!
robofanatic · 2 years ago
That would be icing on the cake, but the real success was to get there. It's a big step forward that'll help humanity, not just India.
Symmetry · 2 years ago
Landing on the Moon isn't easy and making it on the second try is pretty good, it took the USSR tons of tries to finally get a good soft landing. And recently we've seen groups from Russia, Japan, and Israel try to land softly on the moon without success.
Eddygandr · 2 years ago
Please please let this bring on a second space race! I want humans on Mars during my lifetime!
gautamsomani · 2 years ago
Yeah! Me too!
mfrw · 2 years ago
What makes this a "WoWW!", is not that this is the first time humans sent something to the moon, but when one factors in the budget relative to others.
Although, I do not have reference for what the exact budget was/is.
kpandit · 2 years ago
I was trying to find the schedule for the rover including on ISRO's website[1], but the closest I could find was this[2] and this[3] that suggest the rover will be rolled out in the next few hours or may be tomorrow and it has a life expectancy of one lunar day(14 earth days). Anyone knows if it will be streamed as well?
[1] https://www.isro.gov.in/Chandrayaan3.html
[2] https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/chandrayaan-3-miss...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/08/23/science/india-moon-l...
btbuildem · 2 years ago
The moment of landing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dim8elzo5vE
When I look at this, it seems it's a long-range optical feed of the moon surface with lander graphics laid over it. Has anyone found footage of the actual craft touching down? It would be amazing to see.
haolez · 2 years ago
On the dark side of the moon?
btbuildem · 2 years ago
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.
haolez · 2 years ago
I was thinking more about a recorder positioned on earth or on orbit, but I forgot about the main stage of the ship that deploys the probe and should have visibility of the dark side.
14 · 2 years ago
I am hoping that the lander has some ultra high definition video but because of bandwidth we haven't seen it yet but as soon as the upload to earth is complete I am hoping we get a much higher resolution video of this landing.
kimbler · 2 years ago
Hopefully they can leave behind a camera to film the next arrivals.
merrvk · 2 years ago
Amazing, congratulations to all involved. Great day for the nation.
gabereiser · 2 years ago
Congratulations to everyone involved. This is amazing. India has come so far in its space program. Leaps and bounds. It’s astonishing to witness. While SpaceX has the look - Chandrayaan has the function. Now get Jeb back home!!
mercurialsolo · 2 years ago
Any space mission is fairly complex no matter the agency private or public.
For me the most interesting part to watch personally was the telemetry. What's the latency involved here, do they have agency in terms of manual overrides and intervention in case things go wrong?
What does RTT look like, are there more efficient encoding of data to allow minimal information?
0xffff2 · 2 years ago
Latency is dominated by speed of light delays, which are about 2.5 seconds round trip. Encoding is generally more concerned with data integrity than data minimization.
I'm not sure about the details of this mission and whether the Indians have negotiated usage of the Deep Space Network, but with the large antennas of the DSN multi megabit rates are quite achievable.
cuteboy19 · 2 years ago
There is a latency issue, not a throughput issue
skynetv2 · 2 years ago
Despite all the sour comments trying to find fault and criticize, this is a remarkable achievement, especially on the heels of the failed Chandrayaan-2 mission. Congrats to the team!!! Just 4 years to recover from the failure and achieve a phenomenal success. India just keeps executing despite what others may say.
The team deserves even more praise to be able to achieve these wins with limited resources.
kensai · 2 years ago
And a very inexpensive/frugal attempt for that matter! It has been a miracle of cost effectiveness. This is a wonder on its own.
tempnow987 · 2 years ago
Really the true wonder! Compare this to the US's SLS plans! The budget is mindboggling.
zitterbewegung · 2 years ago
Yea, back originally when the SLS was on the drawing board to be made it was supposed to be the safest ROI and it hasn’t even been launched successfully yet .
enragedcacti · 2 years ago
It had a successful mission back in November: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_1
dotnet00 · 2 years ago
To be fair, the spending is SLS's primary mission, the snakes pushing for it couldn't actually care less about how often it flies or how useful it is.
elevaet · 2 years ago
What was the budget, and how does it compare to similar projects?
Joe_Cool · 2 years ago
According to Wikipedia they estimated US$90 Million in July https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandrayaan-3#Funding
ramesh31 · 2 years ago
>It has been a miracle of cost effectiveness. This is a wonder on its own.
India has the third highest global GDP by PPP. This is incredibly powerful when you invest in your citizens education the way they have, as the cost of anything like this ends up coming down to skilled labor prices. Their number one competitive advantage at this point is human capital.
luminati · 2 years ago
re: "Just 4 years to recover" This mission was originally slated for 2021 but COVID ended up delaying it.
mathgeek · 2 years ago
Which to some makes it even more impressive.
bilsbie · 2 years ago
Ok dumb question. In the video starting at 13:15, that’s an animation right?
wheelerof4te · 2 years ago
Yes. They didn't have a live feed from any cameras, as far as I can tell.
itissid · 2 years ago
Congrats to all of the team at ISRO. Assuming the software development for these is non trivial; Its interesting that with the last mission(per Scott Manly) was designed to always select a spot(or more precisely a trajectory) and try hit it.
What made them make that decision? Was it like "lets be as precise as we can because we want to get to the spot X because X is special" and thus "Lets let the software always compensate for any errors to get to X". I am assuming that even at this point they tested the software for extreme conditions. It is most likely that once this assumption was made the Software was built that way, i.e: "Lets test the Software can always correct for any issues to get to X with feedback(like thrust)". It trades off Safety for Accuracy(to hit X).
This time the idea was "Lets select a trajectory to X" but this time "We will let the software prioritize safety(altitude, speed and heading) to be within norm once we start descending towards X". And additionally "Not make any corrections if we are somehow too far off X if it exceeds safety limits". It trades off Accuracy(to hit X) for Safety.
kensai · 2 years ago
Link to Manly's video?
mlni · 2 years ago
Probably this one: https://youtu.be/2ngVl6iO94c
cosmotron · 2 years ago
Maybe this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hP0GbRNGMLk
gourabmi · 2 years ago
If you understand Hindi, Gareeb Scientist has an amazing video about the landing algorithm issues of Chandrayaan-2 https://youtu.be/4oUdD_QSgRs
mandeepj · 2 years ago
> If you understand Hindi
Video has captions
justinclift · 2 years ago
The English captions are pretty decent too. :)
mandeepj · 2 years ago
That's what I meant! I thought it was clear, at least to me.
itake · 2 years ago
Is there a TLDW?
ggop · 2 years ago
IIUC, the salient points are: - target area was very small (500m x 500m) for CY2. With CY3 they've made it bigger at 4km x 4km, allows for larger margin of error.
- CY2 lander had limited leeway in fixing issues, by design. CY3 has more and has landed itself, no assistance from base.
- CY2 lander had limited time to fix itself, apparently it was just a few seconds short of making it fine
erbdex · 2 years ago
+ Software limited the upper limits of thrust correction/per second to 10% of what was possible.
In other words, it could perhaps correct itself in those many seconds but was allowed only small degrees of change.
OrangeMusic · 2 years ago
I asked Kagi's Universal Summarizer, and it said this:
The video provides an explanation for why India's Chandrayaan 2 lunar landing mission failed in 2019. The landing craft Vikram experienced issues during the camera coasting phase where instruments were being calibrated. Specifically, the engine thrust was higher than expected and thrust control couldn't be adjusted to correct the trajectory. As a result, errors accumulated and Vikram's trajectory deviated significantly from the planned path. For Chandrayaan 3, ISRO has implemented changes like adding instantaneous thrust control, increasing the allowed attitude change rate, and enlarging the landing zone to make the mission more robust to errors. The video offers an insightful technical look into what went wrong and how ISRO is addressing it for the next lunar mission.
yencabulator · 2 years ago
Complete wild-ass guess: safe landing spots are hard to find, they knew X to be a larger region safe to land in (so small errors wouldn't matter), and didn't at the time have the more complex subsystem to find safe landing spots (!= X) on the fly based on where the lander happens to go.
7_hours_ago · 2 years ago
I don't understand why you keep referring to the company formerly known as Twitter.
dirtyid · 2 years ago
Fantastic job. A lot of inspiration for 75M.
cratermoon · 2 years ago
for the 2023 season: India 1, Russia 0
abhayhegde · 2 years ago
Especially impressive when taken into account that ISRO couldn't achieve the soft-landing with Chandrayaan-2 four years ago.
One of the big things they changed with this lander compared to Chandrayaan-2 was to increase the landing zone from 500mx500m to 4000mx4000m and adding more sensors and cameras to help the computer find a good landing site.
For those who didn't watch live, there was another hover phase (0 m/s descent) at 150m above the lunar surface before final commit.
sound1 · 2 years ago
Very well explained
ChuckMcM · 2 years ago
The whole hover and look around thing was super impressive to me. That choice to spend mass on fuel for such maneuvers vs science instruments seems to always go to science in NASA debates and we end up with "either it will land here, or it will die." :-)
Great outcome and I look forward to the pictures sent back by the rover!
bluGill · 2 years ago
A very large number of missions to other planets have failed because they crashed on the planet. Thus anyone who is serious about getting a mission to a different planet will put a lot of effort into the landing system. The fuel burn is cheap compared to a crash landing on the moon (as Russia just had a couple days ago). The above is even at NASA, they have done a lot of complex landing systems over the years.
Most missions have several different scientific systems on board. If any one fails well the others still make the mission a partial success. If the landing system fails they all become a failure.
ChuckMcM · 2 years ago
Just checking in here, did you find something in my writing that suggested I was being disparaging or dismissive of what an awesome accomplishment this is? If so would love to know how you got there so that I could be more clear in the future.
Aeolun · 2 years ago
I think he was just expanding on your science vs fuel comment?
bluGill · 2 years ago
My impression is you were trying to say too much effort and fuel was used for landing and they should have put a bit more into science. If that isn't what you meant, my mistake, but it is how I understood it.
ChuckMcM · 2 years ago
Thanks! That helps a lot. It was not what I meant but re-reading it I can see how you got that impression. I find the orbital entry/landing phases of exploratory missions to be the most interesting technically as they always have bunch of technical challenges with engineers making trade-offs. The "sky crane" idea NASA came up with blew me away (as an example). I think the ISRO team really did a fabulous job on the landing here. Watching the numbers touch down was so delicate.
rdsubhas · 2 years ago
To neutral readers, it appears complementary — not contradictory. It adds more info about the cost of failure when trying to optimize for more science.
If you can't see it that way, try picturing the reply prefixed as "to add to that, ..."
RheingoldRiver · 2 years ago
> was to increase the landing zone from 500mx500m to 4000mx4000m
Can you elaborate on this? Presumably it could land...anywhere on the moon, so what exactly does it mean to increase the landing zone? What determines where it can or can't land?
pests · 2 years ago
There is a target area we want to land in order to investigate certain terrain or other POI's near the target.
It obviously can't land on mountains and certain rocky or steep terrain. They know its limitations. These limitations determine where it can or can't land.
During target selection they will find an adaquet place on the surface that meets the criteria.
By increasing from 500m^2 to 4000m^2 they need to find a larger area that meets those same needs.
This also helps during the actual landing. It can aim anywhere inside that 4000m^2 area instead of being limited to just a 500m^2 area.
RheingoldRiver · 2 years ago
oh I see, so it's not that they picked the same center and said "oh btw now you can land in a larger circle around it" but rather they picked a different site altogether? that makes a lot more sense, thanks
bwb · 2 years ago
Congrats to the team!!!
mnemotronic · 2 years ago
Congrats to all the engineers that made this possible. Practice makes perfect. Space travel is hard.
srivmutk · 2 years ago
Momentous day not just for India, but also for humanity.
darthrupert · 2 years ago
Well done to everyone involved!
taveras · 2 years ago
This is incredible! Congratulations to everyone involved
rhuru · 2 years ago
This is a big achievement for India. Not just in space exploration point of view but the side effects of such projects are more interesting.
Dozens of major private companies focused on making this success making various spare parts including steel cranes by Tata steel, special alloys of Mishra Dhatu Nigam (The Alloy Company), wings by L&T Aero etc. etc. I know some people here and they were so proud and focused on "excellence" which I think is often missing in what we Indians normally do.
Space programs are important because of precision required. It created a discipline and desire for perfection not just for ISRO but for all their suppliers and vendors. Hope this habit spreads.
soligern · 2 years ago
There are some very interesting, and arguably more challenging missions coming up including a Venus orbiter, manned space flight and a Martian lander. This should really help solidify the manufacturing space around this.
la64710 · 2 years ago
Is there a video somewhere from within the spacecraft at the exact moment of touchdown?
weaksauce · 2 years ago
about 45 min into the video in the main article
engineer_22 · 2 years ago
No, that's a computer render. From what I can tell, there is no onboard video
sgt · 2 years ago
SpaceX has spoiled us...
mymacbook · 2 years ago
Not yet, closest option now is a computer animation synced with the confirmation of touchdown at minute 44 of the video. :(
mzs · 2 years ago
At least there are these five images from two more cameras: https://twitter.com/isro/status/1694360664675127726
la64710 · 2 years ago
Nice
ChrisMarshallNY · 2 years ago
great to see!
Congratulations, India!
seatac76 · 2 years ago
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/chandrayaan-3-mak... good read on the entire thing.
adrr · 2 years ago
This is awesome. Though one e strange this is having the PM heavily featured in this broadcast with side by side shots.
edpichler · 2 years ago
This is such a difficult achievement. And they did it spending USD 75 Million, almost 2x less the costs of production of the Interestelar movie.
Very well done, India. Respect!
mattigames · 2 years ago
It made much less on profits than Interstellar tho.
pests · 2 years ago
Ah yes, the same way USPS is unprofitable.
biogene · 2 years ago
They didn't add a profit margin because its a government project.
The point was about we could be doing so much more with the resources we have. That is what I got out of it - and I agree.
altroz · 2 years ago
One step in science is leap forward for mankind
jayjpatel · 2 years ago
Congratulations ISRO!!! No road too long, no dream too big.
steno132 · 2 years ago
An embarrassing day for America.
The country that first visited the Moon should have explored the lunar south pole decades ago. Then the dark side of the moon. Then a manned colony.
Instead we are beaten by a foreign nation to the south pole. And our next project is a manned landing on the moon, which we already accomplished in the 1960s.
poyu · 2 years ago
Doesn't it just all comes down to money? The US just doesn't focus on that anymore. Which is a shame, I guess.
kpandit · 2 years ago
We are doing now what you did half a century ago. How exactly is that embarrassing for you?
steno132 · 2 years ago
The US should have been to the first to the lunar south pole, not a foreign country.
nrb · 2 years ago
“Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon July 1969, A.D. We came in peace for all mankind”
To the moon, we’re all foreigners.
steno132 · 2 years ago
Humans don't view things from a moon perspective, they view things from a human perspective.
Space races are real, it's each country for itself, and it's a zero sum game. And today's not a good day.
nrb · 2 years ago
Great to see other countries making accomplishments in space, I don’t see a cause for embarrassment when we’re driving rovers and helicopters around on Mars.
deidei · 2 years ago
Congrats to the team at ISRO!
It makes me wonder, what is it that ISRO does differently than most other government agencies in India that makes them so efficient.
mirchiseth · 2 years ago
It will be cool to send a buddy drone with these landers. A minute or so before the touch down, detach from lander and shoot the landing. Then go back and attach with lander for charging and do periodic flights.
yumraj · 2 years ago
Drone on Moon?
How will it fly? There is no atmosphere.
But yes, it’d be cool if it were possible.
saaspirant · 2 years ago
Some photos of ISRO in early days https://www.reddit.com/gallery/15z1vfs
sinuhe69 · 2 years ago
To appreciate how difficult it could be, play with the Lunar Lander! ;)
pknerd · 2 years ago
A big achivement, congrats from a Pakistani.
PS: Will they share the data with opensource community for analysis?
