Russia's Luna-25 crashes in to Moon | Hacker News Reader

Russia's Luna-25 crashes in to Moon

bbc.com

19 pointspsychphysic20 comments

I have one question:

Are there currently any landers on the near side of the Moon, the one side we can look at through the telescope here on Earth, or are all of them heading only to the dark side?

Chandrayaan-3 is aiming to land later this week at a spot only 32° east, so technically visible through a telescope.

https://geohack.toolforge.org/geohack.php?pagename=Chandraya...

Also, every lander that's ever landed on the near side of the moon is still there.

Nitpick: it's the far side of the moon, not the dark side. Unless you mean "dark" as in "mysterious", but that's just misleading.

"Also, every lander that's ever landed on the near side of the moon is still there."

Cool! Can we spot them with powerful telescopes?

Not with any existing earth-bound or low-earth-orbit telescope. The largest landers were the Apollo landers, which are over 4 meters across. Photographs of the landing sites have been taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and the Very Large Telescope, but none of the photographs have the resolution necessary to see the landers.

https://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/solarsystem/hubble_moon...

On the other hand, some Lunar-orbit spacecraft have directly photographed prior landers. Here is an article with nice photographs from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter of the Apollo 17 landing site, in which the descent stage of the lander, and tracks leading to and from it, are clearly visible.

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/news/apollo-sites.htm...

and here is a timestamp showing an image that India's Chandrayaan-2 orbiter took of the Apollo 11 landing site and descent stage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8oV-Kx26no&t=3613s

Control theory and engineering is extremely difficult to do well and probably the hardest class in many aerospace and mechanical engineering courses.

US sent a bunch of these things to the moon, and none (besides those that were planned to crash) of them crashed.

Perhaps this is a good metaphor of these nations.

Yeah except for

Pioneer 1

Pioneer 2

Pioneer 3

Pioneer 4

Pioneer P-3

Pioneer P-30

Pioneer P-31

Ranger 3

That's not the end of the list I just got bored.

None of which crashed on the moon. Fact is that USA of the late 60s and early 70s was hugely better at this than Russia is today, and probably better than China and India -- although the latter two are making good and steady progress.

And who knows, perhaps the USA couldn't do it either in 2023.

That's excellent spin. At least we didn't crash on the moon! Just at take off :)

Can we just agree that India's Chandrayaan-3 will be a huge moment for humans? The first touch down, and in an unexplored interesting region in most of our lifetimes.

Imagine when they find frozen water down there in the shadowy craters.

That would be sci-fi dream come true.

>That's excellent spin. At least we didn't crash on the moon! Just at take off :)

It wasn't a spin, it was just a refusal to accept your moving the goalposts.

>Can we just agree that India's Chandrayaan-3 will be a huge moment for humans?

Sure, and I have nothing against India's space achievements. India should have shown more backbone in the UN votes against Russia's invasion, though, so they're not entirely benevolent right now.

But there's no comparison to Russia's crimes, of course. They are far worse.

> it was just a refusal to accept your moving the goalposts.

Moving goal posts! Were on the topic of missions to land the south pole of the moon.

You move the goal posts from landing on the south pole to any mission to the moon and add in a caveat of 100 success rate.

Disproven there you claim if the mission didn't leave earth orbit it's not relevant. Disproven there.

You move the goal posts to entirely to UN votes!

Hahahaha what on earth are you smoking?!

I for one will look forwards to India pulling this off, an achievement no other nation has managed..not even the US.

"Perhaps this is a good metaphor of these nations."

Yeah, that US has a far more sophisticated obscuration and propaganda system in place.

As one of the earlier replies shows, there were many failures of the US space program.

It's one thing to think that the US space program is perfect, which is not true. But it's another thing to think that Russia actually has a space program, when it is simply a propaganda tool to make people think of Russia's greatness. There hasn't been any impressive achievements since the Soviet days, in reality.

Are you saying that they withhold information of all the landers that did crash on the moon? This seems like about a similar claim that they never landed people on the moon.

Well, considering how many unmanned probes are crashing into the Moon now, it's very hard for me to believe that the US could land so many manned missions to the Moon.

And not one of them crash-landed. All that in the 1960's.

Some (Ranger) impacted moon intentionally.

There was also one unintentional crash landing of Surveyor-2 (the other 6 Surveyor landed softly).

This is not just engineering case, but this is really large project where involved lot of management, and management in Russia is just hell.

So I think, even with best engineers, this is impossible task for Russia, because lack of good enough management.

India's Chandrayaan-3 is due to attempt to land in a similar area (south pole of moon) on 23rd of August

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