Valorous Vikram lunar lander – or Star Wreck: Enterprise? India's Moon craft goes all silent running during descent India's mission to the Lunar South Pole, known as Chandrayaan 2, suffered a setback early Saturday morning Bengaluru (Bangalore) time, when the spacecraft's Vikram Lander stopped communicating during its descent to the Moon's surface. In an update posted to Twitter at 0300 IST (2130 GMT), the Indian Space Research Organization …
Admittedly I had to chuckle while reading this. Then again, on a second thought, the main reason why an IT offshoring programme went lopsided was not the Indian colleagues but the fscked-up setup from our western side. The Indian IT company had lots of experience working in a certain way, i.e. clients submit their specifications and they implement and deliver them - and they did it well. But our side had a different idea altogether: "we" did not want to lose control over the development process and hence broke open a well-defined process, creating lots of ill-defined interfaces, wanting to manage the Indian development teams from our offices in Europe/USA. It didn't work well.
From my own (admittedly limited) experiences, the staff of ISRO are really good - at least a match for the rest of the world's finest.
But when it comes to out-sourcing it is a different matter because we in the west chose a "partner" based on the cheapest deal. Then we are surprised we get crap service because the brightest Indians are earning more than most of us in other companies!
Indeed . Offshoring has been going on for 3 decades now . Indian companies have been uniforms dismissed as incompetent at it, yet the business has grown from $1-2 billion a year in earnings to over $200 billion now. Now, either they’re sufficiently competent to grow business that much - and it’s a competitive business - or, those who are offshoring are substantially MORE incompetent over the course of a generation.
Either way, the standard ire at the topic is, at best, directed at the wrong entities who only see a guy ‘taking away’ a job and fall over trying to blame him.
Unless it hit and destroyed those tardigrades of course. Not that as a biologist I’m worried about them contaminating the moon. Yes, SOME of them survived a period outside the ISS but they were not crawling about up there, there were in their desiccated suspended animation state and survival was assessed by making them all wet and warm again and seeing how many reanimated.
Those tardigrades on the moon are in a hard vacuum and in a very, very dry environment. They will not be waking up or walking about the regolith. Awake they need what all multicellular and the vast majority of unicellular life need: atmosphere, water and food in a suitable environment. All absent on Luna.
404: Moon Not Found
I did hear that it nearly worked. Well done for getting this far, it demonstrated considerable technical skills even to reach lunar orbit.
Might yet be recoverable if its just as I suspected a comms issue and the rest of the lander is running.
If it s a fuel leak then not such good odds.
From ground radio telescopes it seems to have started tumbling, then ceased transmitting anything shortly afterwards. The footage (such as it was) matches this - the craft thought it was upside down at one point.
So nope, it lithobraked hard. Landing is difficult.
I hope they figure out what went wrong and try again!
Disappointed by the footage though. People clapping isn't interesting or informative. Show us the telemetry displays and somebody explaining what it means.
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Disappointed by the footage though. People clapping isn't interesting or informative. Show us the telemetry displays and somebody explaining what it means.
Am I the only one that really misses the Space-X technical videos? Not to harsh the talking heads they drag into the launch-cast; But I really don't give a rats arse and would much rather watch the telemetry & listen in on "the net" the way they used to in the old technical only or whatever they called those videos
There's kudos for India here .. getting in orbit , sending back images of earth , getting into orbit around the moon is already a major achievement. That the lander stopped responding ( reason x y z ) is just a detail. Would have been cool if it worked , but just to get a probe in that general direction , separation from orbiter etc is a sign of good science and a great achievement. This is not a failure by any means , it's an opportunity to learn and make things right in the next mission. Congrats are in order.
ISRO has further mentioned that due to the precision of orbit injection , the orbiters planned life was extended from the original 1-2 years to potentially 7 years .
ISRO got almost everything right in this . It sucks to lose the lander a mere 2km from surface but it all worked perfectly until then . It’s easier to land on Mars than the moon because the gravity conditions are closer to the Earth compared to what it is on the moon .
They commandeered the lander, and right now they are using it to create the initial building blocks of their invasion fleet, patiently waiting for the day they will return to this big blue marble to reclaim their ancient homeland from the cruel bipeds that exiled them.
No, one of the fine braking thrusters overcompensated and tilted the lander over.
The ISRO have also stated that he lander has been found by the orbiters cameras, and that they’re trying to communicate with it . This suggests it didn’t hard land, because if it was in many pieces there would be no point in trying to talk to it.
The BBC are relaunching the classic 60's comedy Steptoe & Son. Albert and Harold Steptoe have been evicted from their scrap yard in Oil Drum Lane and now roam the lunar surface in search of scrap metal, complete with horse and cart, (forget the name of the horse) for scrap is plentiful....cue sound of typical B rated film flashback music..
Toodle Pip.
Seems it landed a bit heavy, but its in one piece, its been spotted by the orbiter. However, the heavy landing seems to have done sufficient damage to bjork it.
I bet somewhere inside ther a 4 or 6 pin plug hanging off the PSU , jarred with the impact.......just needs one of the 3rd line support team to nip over and push it back on...
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