India to Attempt Moon Landing at the Lunar South Pole Today | Hacker News Reader

India to Attempt Moon Landing at the Lunar South Pole Today

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179 pointsperseusprime11158 comments

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.

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...."

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.

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.

(For the BBC at least) Even with the political coverage there seems to be bias that creeps into their reporting

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

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

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...

What's the point of an impact lantern?

You still get video and sensor readings from the flight, you get a dust plume to analyze from a distance (especially with bigger impactors also giving you data about what's below the surface).

Even making it that far is a testament to the prowess of your space organization. It's a cheaper first step which probably directly and indirectly tests some 75% of the components needed for an actual landing.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

So ... MCAS again?

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

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=...

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

Official site:

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

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

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

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

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

Damn it Moon! Stop eating our drones!

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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

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

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

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

Their trains kick the US' ass. So this metric is BS.

Only because trains can't be operated at a profit in the US. We build planes instead, which go faster, and make money.

Your statement about trains is not correct. US rail is optimized for transporting goods rather than people and overall does a good job. It is also quite profitable. For example, the Union Pacific 10-K shows a healthy profit for FY 2018. [0]

One recent stat I found claimed that in the US 43% of freight travels by rail whereas in the EU it's only 10%. [1] European highways are consequently choked with trucks, something you notice pretty quickly if you drive in countries like Germany. It's easy to overlook, though, when traveling in one of their nice passenger trains. :)

[0] https://www.up.com/cs/groups/public/@uprr/@investor/document... [1] https://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=11847

Congratulations, you've slayed a strawman. It's pretty clear both the OP and myself were talking about passenger trains, which in the US can't be operated at a profit.

It's apples to oranges. The US rail network is optimized to solve another problem. The evidence I've seen indicates that US freight transport by rail is among the most efficient in the world. It's hard to adduce it as an example of technical failure.

Even on your terms of debate I think you need to cite evidence of overall profitability of passenger trains in other countries. Deutsche Bahn (DB) makes some money but depends on substantial subsidies from the German government. [0] Wikipedia shows that most passenger rail seems to be heavily subsidized, though interestingly not Japan. [1]

[0] https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-deutsche-bahn-investment/g...

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

What a shifting of goalposts. It's not Japan's problem that you can't make it profitable.

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

Thanks for that. Wow.

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

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

Between what?

somber

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

~$140M.

What a weird question...

You mean let go NASA scientists?

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.

That also means let go a chunk of NASA employees handling those operations.

Yeah, but then again NASA using Soyuz or SpaceX does that anyway.

Ok you mean now lets handover the dirty job of logistics from Earth to Space to Indians and liberate NASA to focus on more important things. Good Idea!

Man, you have a very weird way of twisting what I said. Anyway, I would refrain from explaining myself.

I didn't mean to twist the topic. I don't see any other benefit of outsourcing. IMO NASA can't afford to pay it's scientists to think about getting something from point A on earth to point B in outer space anymore.

The problem space of space is infinitely large. Outsourcing some parts mean that you can focus on others. Every space agency and company on Earth do not need to work on the exact same problems, that’s all.

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

rapid unscheduled disassembly, looks like.

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

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

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

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

Silence at the command center? What's happening?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Looks like it crashed during the final slowdown.

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

it appears to have stopped listening now

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.

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 :(

They're all just staring at their screens, just waiting for their craft to come back and say something. :(

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

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.

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?

Unlikely. In the absence of air dust particles are ballistic and cannot form a cloud.

Buddy in the video explained that the reason there are 5 in use instead of just 4 for landing was to keep the dust clouds from obscuring the camera footage.

Yes, a stream of high-speed particles flying away from landing site can obscure the ground. It is unlikely that such a stream will be deflected by some rocks to obscure antennas.

The look on the faces is not so optimistic

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

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

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...

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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.

Welcome to the Moon, India!

They had landed one before, Chandrayaan 1.

Edit: but not a soft landing, my mistake.

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

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

> 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…

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

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

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Someone commented this in another thread

>Out of 195 countries it will be only the 4th country to do this shit. So it must be doing some things right. Poverty is one of the problems it is still working on.

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?

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

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

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.

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?

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.

Well, have you really asked opinions of people living in slums? Forget India, how about asking people living under bridges in LA about their opinion on NASA.

Same thing was said about Moon landing. Re: "Whitey on the moon".

This website mistreats me.

Asks me to whitelist it in my adblocker. Then I am sceptical and think: "Hmmm, why do they need JS for a simple information page? Ok lets see, if I disable first party script blocking maybe ..." Then the site goes on nagging me about allowing their shitty scripts. I check again un uMatrix, and what do you know, OFC it loads effin Google Analytics. No thanks, tab closed.

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.

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

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...

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