How cool is that!
Luna-25 has crashed into the Moon:
“The apparatus moved into an unpredictable orbit and ceased to exist as a result of a collision with the surface of the Moon,”
Ahh yes, selenobraking. The reechest kind.
CNN translated it as an “off-design orbit.” Is that like an off-brand toilet paper? 
But much scratchier.
On a more serious note, an over-long deceleration burn or one at the wrong point in a non-circular orbit can easily put the vehicle into an unrecoverable situation.
The one thing we can be reasonably certain about this little oopsie is that it wasn’t caused by a faulty conversion from feet to meters, nor of pounds to kilograms. The Russians are far too smart to use US customary units. Unlike the US.
There are still plenty of unit conversion errors possible. km/hr vs. m/s is easy to mix up. Or even km/s vs. m/s.
And let’s not forget conversions between data types, such as the downconversion from a 64-bit float to a 16-bit fixed type that led to an unhandled exception and the loss of the first Ariane 5 flight.
Yeah. Software dev is hard. Maybe harder than rocket surgery.
Chandrayaan-3 due to land on the moon in the next hour. It looks like there will be some live streams of the descent though not sure how many cameras (if any) are on the lander and if they are beaming live pictures back to the public.
The BBC have got a live page with updates and it looks like they are live streaming the descent:
And they did it! Great achievement for India but also importantly for our scientific understanding of the moon and its resources. Nobody has landed near the poles before and it’s thought there may be a lot more water in this region that humans can use on the lunar surface.
Prime Minister Modi was right there to take instant credit with a speech to mission control within seconds of the landing.
Yay India, and yay humans! This is great news.
(It also somehow seems symbolic of Russia’s decline — much of it self-inflicted — and India’s rise).
I just wish the rover was designed to continue to operate for months, not days. I am not sure how much science is possible in one lunar day of 14 earth days. I like to think of this as more of a technology demonstrator vehicle than an actual, serious scientific effort. There is no point in developing a huge rover when you cannot stick the landing.
Now that India has some degree of experience on what it takes to land on the moon, I fully expect ISRO to develop larger rovers. Definitely the first order of business should be to develop radio-isotope power packages for future rovers.
What wonderful news, made my day!
The Mars rover Opportunity was designed to last 90 days, and ran for more than 14 years. That parameter has an implied “at least”, it doesn’t necessarily exclude “more than”.
True. But without checking into the actual design of the Chandrayaan-3 rover …
It might well have been built to last one daylight cycle and is fully expected to deplete batteries and freeze during its first exposure to the 14 earth-day night cycle. If the margins are sufficiently negative, it’d be beyond miraculous for it to wake up after that first night.
W shall see. I wish them well whatever their design parameters.
India’s rocket journey: from bullock-carts to the moon. India, much like China, arose from very, very humble beginnings but today stands tall as an up-and-coming space power. Hard work pays!
It’s gratifying that, in some small way, human civilization isn’t declining. India is a rising power just as Russia falters. And they’ve done so in spite of a lot of factors working against them. I can always appreciate doing a lot with minimal resources.
Yes, agreed. Despite all the things I don’t like about Modi, I admire India and its people, and wish them many more successes, in space and here on Earth.
I’m surprised they haven’t announced it was lunar surface test to dislodge and measure water.
Kudos to India. I liked the way it was announced on the news with a gymnastics reference. “India sticks landing”.
And lest we forget, India also is one of the countries to have achieved a successful Mars probe.
it also seems remarkable that the russians (who tried to steal the thunder from india by a rushed launch, just to take “first dibs”) failed.
Knowing that justice isn’t a political or scientific variable - but sometimes things just pan out right … just like in those cheesy holliwood dramas
Another upside is that India seems to be less ideologisized in ther space effort than many others.
India is a signatory to the Artemis Accords which Russia is not. So India’s work here will benefit the Artemis program directly.