
India to Attempt Moon Landing at the Lunar South Pole Today - perseusprime11
https://www.space.com/india-chandrayaan-2-moon-landing-webcast.html
======
_august
NYTimes: "India Loses Contact With Chandrayaan-2 Mission During Moon Landing
Attempt"

[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/06/science/india-moon-
landin...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/06/science/india-moon-landing-
chandrayaan-2.html)

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.

~~~
gourabmi
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
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.

~~~
satya71
I'm not even sure they do political coverage too well. From the outside it
appears the editors live in an insular world that doesn't feel anything like
the one outside. They do cover a lot of things, I feel they'd do better if
they focused on fewer things but more depth.

------
ramk
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.

~~~
mav3rick
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
Spacecraft move very, _very_ fast, and 2.1km is quite a tiny distance in the
context of space.

~~~
CydeWeys
Spacecraft definitely do not move "very, very fast" in the terminal stages of
landing, especially not on a low gravity object like the Moon. Apollo 11, for
instance, spent several minutes below 2.1km altitude prior to touchdown. Soft
landings on the Moon are slow events, and given that telemetry is essentially
continuous, something must have gone wrong at around 2.1km.

Although the something going wrong could be as innocuous as losing antenna
alignment, which happens often during landings even when nothing is really
wrong, because the spacecraft is changing pitch to effect the landing.

So my best guess would be loss of telemetry due to loss of antenna alignment,
followed by a bad trajectory for some reason, followed by unintentional
lithobraking.

~~~
CydeWeys
Update:

Per Twitter, it seems like something went wrong during the braking burn. The
spacecraft was left tumbling (which certainly wouldn't help antenna
alignment), and was thus unable to effect its landing burn.

No idea yet exactly what caused the tumbling; there's a variety of potential
causes.

------
sp332
On this livestream
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcJwjuo8pBo](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.

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

------
AareyBaba
Radio Telescope tracking data show moment signals disappeared
[https://twitter.com/cgbassa](https://twitter.com/cgbassa)

------
beiller
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=...](https://twitter.com/ChrisG_NSF/status/1170072433115762688?s=19)

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

Official site:

[https://www.isro.gov.in/chandrayaan2-latest-
updates](https://www.isro.gov.in/chandrayaan2-latest-updates)

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

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iqNTeZAq-c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iqNTeZAq-c)

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

Damn it Moon! Stop eating our drones!

------
m0zg
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.

~~~
yumraj
> 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.

~~~
m0zg
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.

------
deskamess
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6VmPU6Us00))

------
ben174
[https://youtu.be/7iqNTeZAq-c?t=3000](https://youtu.be/7iqNTeZAq-c?t=3000)
deep link to the point where things went wrong.

~~~
dr_dshiv
Thanks for that. Wow.

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

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

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

~~~
dmix
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.

------
abhi3
No telemetry data since about 10 minutes starting just as it was about to
land. Looks like it didn't make it.

~~~
sp332
This is what they've been showing since then:
[https://imgur.com/a/aYgyGLi](https://imgur.com/a/aYgyGLi)

------
hos234
Anyone know how cost effective this is? As in can NASA start outsourcing moon
missions?

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

------
ra7
The orbiter is still working fine. So not a complete failure. Better luck next
time!

------
captn3m0
rapid unscheduled disassembly, looks like.

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

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

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

------
spocklivelong
Silence at the command center? What's happening?

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

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

------
kappi
details of Rover video
[https://youtu.be/V9LFnEycVcg](https://youtu.be/V9LFnEycVcg)

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

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

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandrayaan-2#cite_ref-
Rishito...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandrayaan-2#cite_ref-
Rishitosh_2019_23-0)

------
whatshisface
Looks like it crashed during the final slowdown.

~~~
cabaalis
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.

~~~
sp332
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 :(

~~~
vkou
Has a loss of communication with an unmanned probe on landing ever been
resolved?

~~~
sp332
It happened before landing, so while the probe may have crashed, a crash did
not cause the communications loss. Here are the most similar conditions I
could find that recovered: Beresheet regained communications before landing
but not in time to save the mission. Rosetta's Philae lander ended up in a bad
spot and couldn't communicate much because of low solar power. Hayabusa had
comms trouble when it was supposed to launch from its asteroid, but recovered.

------
dr_dshiv
The look on the faces is not so optimistic

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

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

~~~
stronglikedan
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...](https://www.space.com/india-chandrayaan-2-moon-south-pole-landing-
site.html)

------
craigsmansion
"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.

------
CodeSheikh
Welcome to the Moon, India!

~~~
randrews
They had landed one before, Chandrayaan 1.

Edit: but not a soft landing, my mistake.

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

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

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

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

------
randyk
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
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.

~~~
randyk
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.

~~~
olcor
I find it interesting that you try to answer for the millions who are "living
in the slums".

There is enthusiasm for space in general (many are glued to their TVs or
radios because the landing is going to start soon; one could say it's a point
of national pride). I can say that because I live here, see the poverty in
front of my eyes every day and talk to some of the people facing it. Sure,
quite a few have opinions similar to yours, but they are across the economic
spectrum, not just amongst the poor.

This is an argument which pops out frequently when there's a scientific
success coming out of a developing country, and especially when India tries to
do high-end science. The development in India has been insane, and many have
moved out of poverty in a relatively short span of time, mainly because of
multiple efforts by the people, the government and with the help of other
countries, and this is going to continue happening. Meanwhile, space
exploration will continue, whether some people like it or not.

