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Comment by throwbadubadu | Hacker News Reader

"However, there was uncertainty about the possibility of these to resume functioning after facing extremely low temperatures of the lunar night which can go as low as -200 degrees Celsius.

Moreover, its battery needed to remain at a certain level to be able to recharge again with the solar dawn."

Naive guy would think that alone can and would be extensively tested on earth?

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> Naive guy would think that alone can and would be extensively tested on earth?

The article says the probe achieved its objectives in the first active period. This attempted wakeup was for bonus time.

And it would have been designed to achieve all those objectives in the 14-day lunar sunshine period.

You could design a car that runs for a billion miles, but no-one could afford it. You pick a reasonable lifespan for a project and target your specifications around that.

Ya, and the Indian mission was already one of the lowest budget successful missions there has been. The US is one of the few countries that can spend billions on missions where the lander may last months/years longer than expected.

We probably found it cheaper to build it, send it, test it than build a lab to get to -200°c :)

I too like to live dangerously and test in production

Hopefully you never get to peek behind the scenes of much of the world's running infrastructure.

You have to build the thing and test every possible problem before you build it again and do it for real

We all know everyone is perfectly willing to pay and wait for thorough testing so it works perfectly

Nobody would ever underfund something and then complain about how the final product didn't produce 150% of what was promised

Everyone tests in production. Some people also have additional environments to test in.

And yet the lunar lander and the astronauts on the moon did just fine. Did the lunar lander and the body suits have heaters?

They did, but they also left before the lunar night.

The humans inside the suits and lander also provided some useful heat. For most spacecraft, once you put humans into them the problem changes from conserving heat to getting rid of it.

Ok so at 120 degrees C got it

Kinda crazy what effect different albedos have, isn’t it? :)

If you haven't already, I would highly recommend watching 'Apollo 13'[1]. On a technical basis it is really accurate to the real-life events. The astronauts having to shut down the lunar lander's (LEM) heating system comes into the story about half way through. It's one of my all-time favourite films!

[1]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112384/

Or, if you want to be a purist, there's this. [0](thank you whoever submitted this to HN a while back!)

[0] - https://apolloinrealtime.org/13/

Wow, that's amazing. I'm know what I'm going to be doing on Sunday!

They didn't last 14 days or try to survive the lunar night, and we spent a rather large % of our GDP on the project, while India's landing was an order of magnitude cheaper than any previous moon lander.

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