India to Attempt Moon Landing at the Lunar South Pole Today

https://www.space.com/india-chandrayaan-2-moon-landing-webcast.html

179 122 7 years ago

saagarjha2• 7 years ago

The mission entered orbit just under a month later, with the Chandrayaan-2 orbiter placed into orbit 62 (100 meters) above the lunar surface.

Uh, I think you might be missing some correct units there…

Arnavion• 7 years ago

It says "62 miles (100 kilometers)" at the moment.

imglorp• 7 years ago

Interestingly, the lander separated from the orbiter on Sep 2 into its own orbit. Its main descent begins from around 30 km.

saagarjha2• 7 years ago

It looks to have been fixed shortly after I made my comment.

hos234• 7 years ago

Anyone know how cost effective this is? As in can NASA start outsourcing moon missions?

sidcool• 7 years ago

The mission has been executed on a shoe string budget. More than outsourcing, a partnership will be more beneficial. NASA's advanced Technology and ISRO's low costs could be explored.

greglindahl• 7 years ago

NASA and ISRO are already partners, including for this very mission.

perseusprime11• 7 years ago

~$140M.

robofanatic6• 7 years ago

You mean let go NASA scientists?

actuator6• 7 years ago

I think he meant use ISRO's operations to send NASA's probes, rovers, satellites etc. for missions like these. NASA still gets to study and conduct experiments at a lower cost.

actuator6• 7 years ago

It is carrying payload from NASA as well. I think partnerships like these would be better for everyone as cost of a individual launch is still high.

oyebenny• 7 years ago

What a weird question...

sephamorr• 7 years ago

The scientific payloads of missions (development, design, manufacturing, operation, analysis) are usually a large percentage of the total mission's cost. It's worth looking at the exact scientific capabilities of a mission while comparing it with the cost. It's amazing how economically the Indians sent a probe to Mars, but its scientific capabilities were far smaller than the billion dollar NASA missions.

kappi2• 7 years ago

details of Rover video https://youtu.be/V9LFnEycVcg

dmix6• 7 years ago

I'm curious why MacOS doesn't ship with a clock app for timers and alarms for this type of stuff. Seems like an obvious choice for an iOS port.

youeseh• 7 years ago

You should build one! And then make it so good that Apple will finally copy it for a future version of MacOS :D

dmix6• 7 years ago

I'm only complaining because the ones in the App Store are awful. I just want the native iOS one.

But yeah I dont need a 50th side project.

hello_tyler• 7 years ago

The calendar ? It's not really a 'clock app' but lets you setup timers and popup notifications. You're right it should be baked in with the system clock.

billfruit2• 7 years ago

Is the landing site on the near side or far side?

actuator6• 7 years ago

Near side[1]. Specifically south polar region of the moon.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandrayaan-2#cite_ref-Rishito...

nickserv• 7 years ago

Wow what horrible ad laden site with tons of useless videos and JavaScript.

Official site:

https://www.isro.gov.in/chandrayaan2-latest-updates

kappi2• 7 years ago

ISRO live streaming ============= Watch Live : Landing of Chandrayaan-2 on Lunar Surface

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iqNTeZAq-c

shaan7• 7 years ago

Um, I tested both on Chrome and Firefox and can't see any ads.

randyk3• 7 years ago

I love India and its people, having spent five years there managing a dev team for our US operations. I’m American, parents were born in India.

And I gotta say, landing on the moon is by far the last thing India’s people need right now.

The amount of suffering, pollution, corruption, water shortages, is simply overwhelming. If you haven’t actually lived there it’s easy to say that India should still shoot for the stars while solving problems at home. From someone who lived there, let me tell you that they should focus on immediate problems first.

deathtrader666• 7 years ago

Yeah immediate problems are being resolved by some people. But not all of our billion+ population needs to be so myopic.. there's a few that are rightly pushing the boundaries for the global scientific research.

randyk3• 7 years ago

The people that push for Indian space exploration are either (1) not living in India, or (2) they are living in India and doing well economically.

If you ask people living in the slums about this, they’ll give you a very different perspective than what you read on HN. And they vastly outnumber the people in India who are doing well.

olcor2• 7 years ago

There are many attempts ongoing to solve immediate problems. Doesn't mean that we can't aim for space or push through with science which isn't immediately focused on solving issues on the ground. ISRO is only one of the government's many agencies. It's doing good work and getting scientific publicity, but so are many other programs.

If America can focus on space as well as the opioid crisis and mass shooting issues, why can't India do something similar?

robofanatic6• 7 years ago

Perhaps the solution for those problems can be found while shooting for the stars. Don't you think new opportunities will knock India's doors if scientific projects like these are successful?

randyk3• 7 years ago

The people that push for Indian space exploration are either (1) not living in India, or (2) they are living in India and doing well economically. If you ask people living in the slums about this, they’ll give you a very different perspective than what you read on HN. And they vastly outnumber the people in India who are doing well.

actuator6• 7 years ago

Sigh. It is amazing how myopic we get seeing a different place. It reminds me of that NYT cartoon which was in poor taste. I can see some reasons why India would want to do this.

- They can use the technology developed during these missions for powering commercial space operations(It is an extremely lucrative market, moneywise). They have a commercial arm.[1]

- They have their own use of satellites as well like remote sensing, navigation(I think it is called NAVIC) etc.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antrix_Corporation

infiniteseeker• 7 years ago

Easy to criticize eh?

Since you were born of Indian parents, it will be easy for you to get OCI/PIO. Why dont you go there and start helping with alleviating poverty, corruption, water shortages and suffering? Come on...you can do it...

Bhilai• 7 years ago

Advancing Science and technology is exactly the thing people of India need right now. This kind of mission inspires confidence in a nation's abilities and also inspires a generation of people to pursue science. Wont you agree that US moon landing inspired a generation of Americans?

mav3rick5• 7 years ago

Not to mention remote sensing satellites directly help an Agrarian economy,

z3phyr• 7 years ago

I can say similar stuff about every country.

1960s: I love USA, but racism, sexism, suffrage etc, so they should not attempt to do space stuff.

cabaalis2• 7 years ago

Think of what jfk said.

"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 that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."

It's a unifying goal, which is good for any country. Good for India. God knows the US needs a unifying goal now. We seem to only be united by our disrespect of each other.

dang• 7 years ago

This is a classic flamewar topic that leads to nasty places and never generates anything interesting or new. Please don't go there on HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

billfruit2• 7 years ago

Any idea what's the name of the area in which it is going to touch down?

stronglikedan2• 7 years ago

As of yet unnamed, according to an article linked within the article. [0]

It doesn't have a name, at least not yet. But in just a few days, if all goes well, it could become one of the most important places on the moon's surface.
That spot is a highland that rises between two craters dubbed Manzinus C and Simpelius N. On a grid of the moon's surface, it would fall at 70.9 degrees south latitude and 22.7 degrees east longitude. It's about 375 miles (600 kilometers) from the south pole.

[0] https://www.space.com/india-chandrayaan-2-moon-south-pole-la...

whatshisface2• 7 years ago

Looks like it crashed during the final slowdown.

cabaalis2• 7 years ago

I've been watching for a few minutes. It appeared to do a weird roll during braking, and then the line of descent greatly varied from the anticipated line. The room was jubilant prior to this, and now very somber.

Hopefully there will be good news. But I think it crashed.

sp3325• 7 years ago

That's the problem with simply losing communication. It's not positive evidence of a crash, it's just a lack of information. Possibly the landing jostled antennas or power relays causing a communications glitch... but you can't rule out that it just crashed :(

scohesc• 7 years ago

Could it be possible that all the dust being kicked up in the "air" during landing could act as some sort of chaff that blocks radio signals?

trothamel• 7 years ago

The Deep Space Network shows that it's transmitting to Vikram, and two antennas are task with listening to it, but it's not receiving a signal. That's not good.

https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html

garyfirestorm• 7 years ago

it appears to have stopped listening now

spocklivelong• 7 years ago

Silence at the command center? What's happening?

stronglikedan2• 7 years ago

Seems like they lost contact with the lander. (I think - I heard them say they lost contact with "station".) Fucking hair-raising...

dmix6• 7 years ago

At 400m is was 1km off from the landing site, which you can see on the descent map it's off centre.

CodeSheikh• 7 years ago

Welcome to the Moon, India!

randrews• 7 years ago

They had landed one before, Chandrayaan 1.

Edit: but not a soft landing, my mistake.

abhi3• 7 years ago

No telemetry data since about 10 minutes starting just as it was about to land. Looks like it didn't make it.

sp3325• 7 years ago

This is what they've been showing since then: https://imgur.com/a/aYgyGLi

dr_dshiv2• 7 years ago

The look on the faces is not so optimistic

sp3325• 7 years ago

On this livestream https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcJwjuo8pBo a commentator explains that the probe had some autonomy in choosing exactly where to land. So the deviation from the expected course was not necessarily something going wrong.

Edit: Apparently it can hover at 400m for up to 90 seconds to image the potential landing site. The loss of communication actually happened before the hovering phase started.

whatshisface2• 7 years ago

Yes, and the rotation of the probe resulted in the engine pointing downwards, which means that it may have been intentional.

dmix6• 7 years ago

They said in the video when they were informing Modi that it was 1km from the original landing site at last reading at 400m.

wbhart• 7 years ago

Unfortunately it could not have been hovering though. The velocity was almost certainly too high for the spacecraft to handle.

auslander2• 7 years ago

So ... MCAS again?

djsumdog2• 7 years ago

Everyone in the room looks so worried and sad. No comms since the 1km mark.

Damn it Moon! Stop eating our drones!

deskamess• 7 years ago

4:42 EST - Some communication between lander and orbiter

4:47 - Official statement => Communication between lander and ground station was lost at 2.1 km altitude. There was no mention of earlier communication between lander and orbiter.

Edit: Source: Parroting the Youtube stream (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6VmPU6Us00)

captn3m0• 7 years ago

rapid unscheduled disassembly, looks like.

ralusek• 7 years ago

If you write your schedules in pencil, there's no such thing.

beiller• 7 years ago

Lost comms after landing, suggesting maybe a crash landing. But not all is lost there is still an orbiter where most experiments are supposedly going to run. See https://twitter.com/ChrisG_NSF/status/1170072433115762688?s=...

dmix6• 7 years ago

Confirmed on the feed the signal was lost at 2.1km from surface. "The data is being analyzed".

craigsmansion• 7 years ago

"To continue using TechCrunch and other Oath sites and apps, we need you to let us set cookies to collect your data."

No, dear TechCrunch, for you to publish in EU markets you need to obey the fine law. Otherwise, feel free to withdraw, the sooner the better.

ramk• 7 years ago

The official news announced by the ISRO chairman on the live broadcast was "the last signal received from the lander was 2.1 KM from the lunar surface. Data is being analyzed as of now".

In all probability indicates a crash landing.

mav3rick5• 7 years ago

This is a dumb question but are telemetry intervals that far apart ? No data was sent in the last 2.1 KMs ? Or something at that level caused systems to fail immediately. Space is hard.

userbinator• 7 years ago

Spacecraft move very, very fast, and 2.1km is quite a tiny distance in the context of space.

ramshanker• 7 years ago

Hope is a wonderful thing............. With You ISRO.

_august• 7 years ago

NYTimes: "India Loses Contact With Chandrayaan-2 Mission During Moon Landing Attempt"

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/06/science/india-moon-landin...

Edit:

NYTimes subtitle says "The country will likely have to wait for a future mission to join the elite club of nations that have landed on the moon."

Wikipedia for Chandrayaan-1 says "On 14 November 2008, the [Chandrayaan-1 probe] struck the south pole in a controlled manner, making India the fourth country to place its flag insignia on the Moon"

.. huh?

Edit 2: Ah, impact landing vs soft landing.

dmix6• 7 years ago

Apparently Russia was supposed to build the lander but backed out after one of their other landers crashed, which they were basing the Indian one on. So India built their own.

Although ISRO finalised the payload for Chandrayaan-2 per schedule,[37] the mission was postponed in January 2013[38] and rescheduled to 2016 because Russia was unable to develop the lander on time.[39][40] Roscosmos later withdrew in wake of the failure of the Fobos-Grunt mission to Mars, since the technical aspects connected with the Fobos-Grunt mission were also used in the lunar projects, which needed to be reviewed.[39] When Russia cited its inability to provide the lander even by 2015, India decided to develop the lunar mission independently.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandrayaan-2?oldformat=true

rhcom2• 7 years ago

Chandrayaan-1 was an impact lander, so it landed on the Moon in a "controlled manner" (ie on purpose). Apparently the lander was painted with the Indian flag[1].

1: https://web.archive.org/web/20090112054329/http://economicti...

exhilaration• 7 years ago

What's the point of an impact lantern?

gourabmi• 7 years ago

NYT seems to have taken BBC's place in throwing shade towards the Indian space program. From the article:

"...The outcomes of the Indian and Israeli missions highlight that lower costs can mean higher risk of failure, which NASA will need to adjust to as it pursues a lower-cost approach...."

bubblethink• 7 years ago

Sites like NYT or BBC are highly inept at reporting anything remotely technical in nature. They are good for general political coverage to an extent, but that's where it stops. This is more apparent when the subject matter is closer to our areas of expertise, but even otherwise, it is not too hard to tell that they are out of their depth.

whenchamenia• 7 years ago

Its pretty factual tbh. If they wanted to throw shade, they could hve brought up indias deplorble acts producing tons of space junk recently.

ben174• 7 years ago

https://youtu.be/7iqNTeZAq-c?t=3000 deep link to the point where things went wrong.

dr_dshiv2• 7 years ago

Thanks for that. Wow.

There appears to be conflict between the theater of mission control and the actuality. Or?

sp3325• 7 years ago

Between what?

sudhirj• 7 years ago

Everyone as happy as long as everything was going well, and the mood fell when the lander stopped reporting. What conflict?

rolltiide• 7 years ago

somber

ra7• 7 years ago

The orbiter is still working fine. So not a complete failure. Better luck next time!

AareyBaba• 7 years ago

Radio Telescope tracking data show moment signals disappeared https://twitter.com/cgbassa

m0zg5• 7 years ago

IMO something like this is a true measure of technological advancement of a nation. This means India is roughly as technologically advanced as the US was 60 years ago, which is impressive by any measure, since space-related things haven't progressed all that much since then. They got super close this time. In a couple more attempts they'll figure it out if they don't run out of money. I hope Modi sees the potential to inspire the nation. For 10 cents per person, inspiring people to take up science is a no-brainer.

Armisael16• 7 years ago

You’re saying the Japan is less technologically advanced than the US was in 1966? That seems like a stretch.

m0zg5• 7 years ago

Overall, quite possibly yes. They do consumer electronics quite well, but their space program is a bit of a joke.

yumraj• 7 years ago

this is a true measure of technological advancement of a nation

That's an interesting point and worth further analysis. But, just to probe a little, that would imply that US and USSR were technically equally advanced in the 60s.

Is that true?

Moreover, what about nations that have not invested much in space at all, but otherwise are probably doing well from technical advancement standpoint.

This is certainly a measure, but is it the measure?

Modi is definitely investing in space, with the manned mission in a couple of years. I just hope this doesn't impact that.

m0zg5• 7 years ago

The USSR was the first to land on the moon and send images back (in 1966), but ever since the US landed people there, they were technologically behind, albeit not very far behind. They could have done it, but with Americans flying there twice a year, the race was already lost. So they sent some large robotic landers instead (Lunokhod 1 and 2), the kind that are the size of a VW beetle and are designed to survive the night. Unlike manned missions, which lasted at most 3 days, Lunokhod 2 was active on the surface of the moon for 4 months, traveled 42km, and sent back 80000 pictures.

thewhitetulip• 7 years ago

Modi is definitely investing in space, with the manned mission in a couple of years. I just hope this doesn't impact that.

Are you serious? All these projects were funded since UPA2 time. This craft was to go in 2013 but Russia backed out so postponed to 2016.

Same story with Mars Orbiter Mission

I don't think Modi has any money left after his disasterous economic policies which have brought an economic slowdown. Also if he is funding space missions they'll fly in 2025 or so because building those missions takes time

rinkleby56• 7 years ago

It is probably a lot easier to do it today than it was 60 years ago when no one had done it. I think it is possible even for a well-funded private company (like Spacex) to at least come close if they thought it was worth it

ptrenko• 7 years ago

It started tumbling with thrusters on. So when it flipped the probe accelerated towards the ground rather than decellerate.

auslander2• 7 years ago

They should have open sourced their navigation control codebase, so we can see and fix whatever bugs there are.

laythea• 7 years ago

Whenever I see India running a space program I always think that its money would be better spent raising the level of society there.

frequentnapper• 7 years ago

how can one spend money to raise the level of society?

India to Attempt Moon Landing at the Lunar South Pole Today

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