Congrats to all of the team at ISRO. Assuming the software development for these is non trivial; Its interesting that with the last mission(per Scott Manly) was designed to always select a spot(or more precisely a trajectory) and try hit it.
What made them make that decision? Was it like "lets be as precise as we can because we want to get to the spot X because X is special" and thus "Lets let the software always compensate for any errors to get to X". I am assuming that even at this point they tested the software for extreme conditions. It is most likely that once this assumption was made the Software was built that way, i.e: "Lets test the Software can always correct for any issues to get to X with feedback(like thrust)". It trades off Safety for Accuracy(to hit X).
This time the idea was "Lets select a trajectory to X" but this time "We will let the software prioritize safety(altitude, speed and heading) to be within norm once we start descending towards X". And additionally "Not make any corrections if we are somehow too far off X if it exceeds safety limits". It trades off Accuracy(to hit X) for Safety.
IIUC, the salient points are:
- target area was very small (500m x 500m) for CY2. With CY3 they've made it bigger at 4km x 4km, allows for larger margin of error.
- CY2 lander had limited leeway in fixing issues, by design. CY3 has more and has landed itself, no assistance from base.
- CY2 lander had limited time to fix itself, apparently it was just a few seconds short of making it fine
I asked Kagi's Universal Summarizer, and it said this:
The video provides an explanation for why India's Chandrayaan 2 lunar landing mission failed in 2019. The landing craft Vikram experienced issues during the camera coasting phase where instruments were being calibrated. Specifically, the engine thrust was higher than expected and thrust control couldn't be adjusted to correct the trajectory. As a result, errors accumulated and Vikram's trajectory deviated significantly from the planned path. For Chandrayaan 3, ISRO has implemented changes like adding instantaneous thrust control, increasing the allowed attitude change rate, and enlarging the landing zone to make the mission more robust to errors. The video offers an insightful technical look into what went wrong and how ISRO is addressing it for the next lunar mission.
Complete wild-ass guess: safe landing spots are hard to find, they knew X to be a larger region safe to land in (so small errors wouldn't matter), and didn't at the time have the more complex subsystem to find safe landing spots (!= X) on the fly based on where the lander happens to go.
Scott Manly has a video on why he thinks the last one failed. It sounds like their landing software didn't have "oh crap, we're way off course, just land wherever". It only had the happy path of "fly to here and land", so when it switched to the landing phase it tried valiently (including flying upside down) to try to fly back to the landing zone, but the landing zone was much further than fuel supplies allowed.
Hopefully they have upgraded software to just gracefully attempt a landing, and hopefully they won't be off course.
Yes, this seems to be one of the issues. Here is a talk by ISRO Chairman S Somanath at Indian Institute of Science (IISc) about the same and what they added. He goes into details of what went wrong. These are based on my limited understanding. One of the thrusters had an issue and got activated for longer (or may be activation profile of thrusters at its extreme's were different from modeled). They had a narrow landing region selected as final position (even one possible point). So now their control system tried to correct this but the algorithm had a bug and that caused it to be further delayed. At this point the correction required, i.e; thrusters to be activated, was outside the tolerance levels. So finally ended up with 50m/s vertical speed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZ2sNRP1opY&t=1440s
With new one, they did couple of things. Larger area to be selected for landing based on camera input. Escape sequence to more achievable points, if something like this happens again. They increased the tolerance from 10 degrees to 25 degrees and guessing fixed the bug in code. They also did some smoothening of the trajectory for different phases to make it more continuous. I think they also made other changes in engines among other things and a whole host of testing.
If anything they seem to have overcorrected for this. This landing path stopped with a near hover at around 800m, then a prolonged hover at 150m while the lander scoped the situation, then an extremely slow descent that allowed for corrections the whole way down. Very impressive.
Yes, it was a very conservative landing trajectory. But it is very, very difficult to get a hoverslam right the first time, or the second, or the third...
I did like seeing the live images captured during descent, I also hope those get made into a video and posted online.
This doesn't seem to have been a hoverslam, though -- the probe was hovering at, I think, 150 meters for quite some time, and then maintained a steady and slow rate of descent while still under power.
Yes, Chandrayaan-3 definitely did not performance a hoverslam, the landing was much more conservative than that. With a hoverslam, everything has to go exactly right. A valve that is slightly sticky can be enough to wreak everything.
If they have the fuel available, may as well be very conservative. Either burn the fuel on descent or have it sit in the tank forever on the lunar surface.
Not only was the Chandrayaan 3 budget lesser than that of Chandrayaan 2, as a meme doing the rounds point out, it was lesser than the budgets of some Hollywood blockbusters like Interstellar. So yeah, safe to say they could have had the budget for more if necessary.
"Fuel budget", "mass budget", "payload budget", even "delta-v budget" are common terms in spaceflight and refer to how much of a valuable thing a spacecraft can carry given some pesky laws of physics [1], nothing to do with money (except insofar as more money would let you build a bigger spacecraft…)
This is one reason why low cost and efficiency are just a nice-to-have when it comes to to space exploration. Moreso the farther you go. A unique mission like a lunar polar landing should be conservatively engineered, where that is possible, on the first try. Early optimization and space exploration don't mix.
The most efficient landing - high impulse reverse gravity turn suicide burn vs. what they did - hovering mid-space two or three times, slowly inching toward ground while fighting gravity.
Could you elaborate how that applies here? Communication is out of the question - there's nothing the people on the ground can correct. And the lander apparently failed because it tried to navigate its way back to the designated landing site.
Communicate wasn't the important part, but you got it in your last sentence. It was trying to navigate over aviate - trying to get to its designated landing spot too hard so that it neglected/failed to stay airborne (spaceborne).
If you crashed trying to ensure your antenna was optimally oriented then you chose “communicate” over “aviate”. It’s a stretch, but the point is to clearly define your priorities and stick to them, even in a panic
I really ought to dig up a reference for this, but there are strong echoes from the past here. Margaret Hamilton (who coined the term 'software engineering' and can be seen standing next to a tall pile of green bar printouts of the Apollo software) brought her daughter to work one weekend during the Apollo program and she (daughter) fiddled with the buttons and caused an error condition. Hamilton, based on this, argued that the software should account for the possibility of mistakes. Management's view was that the highly-trained astronauts wouldn't make mistakes. In time, Hamilton prevailed, and was proven correct.
Having seen what happens when you let a toddler start randomly pressing stuff on an Android tablet she was spot on, and if anything every environment should be out through this.
The recent japanese lander had something like this happen a while back. The altitude radar noticed a sudden 2km drop in ground-level, and the system assumed it was broken and stopped using that data.
Turns out it just flew over a cliff edge that actually does that. Completely by accident.
They picked a new landing site late in the program and didn't get the topography near that site, or run enough combinations through the software in test.
In general software development it's usually not a problem if your program crashes, then you can fix the bug and run it again. If the thing that crashes is a lunar lander however, you should put a bit more effort into covering all the eventualities...
That might still be OK if that path literally should never happen in normal operation, but us used, e.g., to handle an error, or at least log it, if the impossible happens because the software is deployed in some unexpected configuration
They also had an issue with the thrust gradient it could only do it increments in 20% which was too much of a change this one was finer which allowed for better control authority.
Incredibly Kerbal vibe. I think something like that happened to me when using MechJeb. (it even has a "land whenever" feature, which it was too late to use at that point)
That is just a testament to the incredible work of the Squad team. The Indian landing is not similar to Kerbal, rather, Kerbal is very very similar to the real experience. Amazing.
Not considering such a basic error condition seems like a gross omission.
This can't even come from the software engineering, but must be some kind of managerial failure (e.g. we're short on time, but have to report great progress to my boss, so skip this scenario).
This is the software engineering version of "I am very badass", passing judgement on software at the cutting edge of science, while sitting at home writing React code.
You're mixing up terms here. Gravy seals is an insult term, used for typically out of shape people who are heavy into gun/militia/i-am-very-badass type culture.
The latter two are just ribbing jokes about the Air Force, from the other branches usually. My old (Army) boss used to tell me to 'take off your air force gloves' if he ever saw me with my hands in my pockets.
Absolutely. Just pointing out that one is strictly a pejorative, while the others would likely be viewed as 'someone in the airforce.' I think OP was wanting things more of the former, like gravy seals, meal team six, y'all queda, etc.
Almost all space mission code only ever has the so-called 'happy path'. We rely on extremely tight mechanical and aerospace engineering tolerances to achieve that happy path.
The Hubble Space Telescope's primary mirror grinding was off by a matter of micrometres, and resulted in blurry images.
Consider all the Mars rovers. Imagine some wind gust threw the descending module off course, or a retro-rocket failed because of vibrations.
Writing code for space missions isn't like writing a CRUD app. Developers can't just teleport to a space probe millions to billions of kilometres away to rectify errors and debug running code on the fly.
For the record, the 'failure path' for Apollo 11 was to get the US President to announce to the world that the two astronauts would likely be marooned on the Moon. Apollo 13 very nearly failed, too.
Apollo 1 landed on the "failure path". Neil Armstrong noticed that the target was a boulder field, took manual control, discovered his new spot had a crater, and finally found level ground. They had low fuel but not dangerously low.
If Apollo 11 had followed the "happy path", they would have crashed and died.
Hubble was also the "failure path". The main mirror was flawed and had to be corrected.
If you write the failure path, then you also have to ensure it doesn't fire when there wasn't really a failure and do unnecessary heroics.
Same reason you can't program a self driving car to save a person by sacrificing a squirrel. It's just going to run over the squirrel when it didn't need to.
When saying "we", do you mean you write code for the space missions?
Writing only happy path code as a standard practice in the space sector seems quite absurd. You won't ever achieve absolute precision and errors do happen, yet it seems like systems recover most of the time.
Recently, the antenna of Voyager 2 got misaligned, but it is expected to recover from that. That was only the last problem it encountered over its very long mission - and it managed to recover from all of those so far!
Voyager 2 is already recovered, they waited until it was at the best possible (but still wrong orientation) and just yelled at it so that it heard, even with it being misaligned.
Voyager's programming just brings joy to me to think about.. I mean it's the system as a whole (of course) .. but the fact that they've been capable of flying through the environments they have been, using points of light to align themselves, among other things.. for decades .. and recover from incidents.. is just something I marvel at.
Wow I can't believe I didn't hear about this. It was all over the news when they broke it, so I figured it would be just as widely reported when they fixed it. It's been almost 3 weeks.
There was a NASA project to start developing flight software that's smarter in this kind of way, the Remote Agent. It got an award after flying, but if they continued that line of research I haven't heard about it. https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20000116204/downloads/20...
Trying to hand roll a super robust AI software usually backfires. Emergency mode triggers right in the middle of the happy path and ruins your uh, a day if you're lucky. They know that, even I kinda know that.
That can't still be the case these days, can it? Extremely tight mechanical and engineering tolerances are very expensive compared with merely 'very very' tight tolerances, and I'd imagine the difference between the two can be bridged with more intelligent software in place of "gyroscope + clock + maybe PID loop"?
Yeah, this reads like two people defining happy path subtly differently: one is saying the happy path is anything within acceptable strictly defined mission parameters and tolerances, the other thinks it is the sequence of steps that is expected to successfully execute the mission without ever encountering an exceptional situation (which is the conventional software view of the term), but there are exceptional situations which may be covered in the specification of the mission and so “on the happy path”.
In the case the system strays outside mission success parameters then aborting could make sense. The question there looks to be if the success parameters were defined too narrowly - it sounds like an error in specification that prioritizes landing in the required area over the possibility of landing at all.
The classic hardware engineering response of "we'll just fix it in software". Turns out fixing things in software is even more expensive because it's just so easy to make changes that a combinatoric number of changes sneak in.
Ohhhh yes. I've been on the receiving end of this one. Designing a system which can accommodate higher tolerances on some hardware components through software controls is one thing. Being handed a poorly performing piece of hardware and told to "just fix it in software" is quite another.
Writing code for something that flies into space is not nearly as easy as you think it is. Perhaps the next time you write a comment you could first develop the software which you're complaining about first. I'm sure it would be a trivial task for someone of your stature :)
I'm not saying it is easy to handle. But this mode of failure could be expected and prepared for. It's not that uncommon that the spacecraft finds itself in a position which was not calculated.
Or, are you saying that it's expected that the mission did not count with this scenario, and that future missions don't need to account for that either?
You are saying "gross omission" like this is some Python script, like they are skipping the else clause for a condition. Imagine trying to land a plane that is flying at Mach 2, with no direct control, only a video feed with 4 seconds resolution, a bunch of sensors and a tank of fuel for retrograde burn to slow you down. Can you even fathom the number of scenarios that can happen. Your application may have 1 happy path and 2 sad path. Here you get only 1 happy path, a few not so happy path where your probe land sideway or just roll down a crater; and the rest of them are every other combinations of your probe's orientation and speed vector and collision location.
Hell, you can run a few thousand simulators for every scenario you can think of during descent, including lost of burner, propellant leak, etc, and then during the actual descent a chip get burnt because of a stray cosmic ray. There will still be somebody on HN call you out for cutting corner.
That's probably why they haven't officially straight-up announced the issue.
This wouldn't be the first time that a mission failed due to embarrassing failures in basic software practices (eg Starliner's initial software bugs emerging from a lack of integrated testing).
Main difference is that you aren't triggering a billion overly sensitive nationalistic folks when you point out similar embarrassing errors in most other countries' programs. Eg the time NASA lost a probe due to miscommunicated units, the Apollo 1 disaster, the space shuttle disasters, or the tape around the wiring in Starliner, which was intended to be fire retardant actually turning out to be flammable...
Hell, Japan's Hakuto-R also failed because the software's error detection was buggy, and they openly admitted as much without any bluster about how no one but other people with experience writing code for space probes can criticize them.
They've given out vague explanations such as a software glitch, while holding the detailed post-mortem back claiming the obviously absurd excuse of national security concerns.
This is counter to how they typically operate as well as how most other agencies/companies around the world operate these days, where they at least explain what went wrong. eg Hakuto-R's team explaining that their flight software thought the radar altimeter was malfunctioning when it wasn't, causing it to rely on the IMU and thus it thought the surface was much higher than it actually was.
Might want to update your general knowledge. The ISRO Chief explained this in an interview. It wasn't just passed off as "software glitch" with no explanation.
Chairman S Somanath has given three main reasons that led to the crash-landing of the Vikram lander on September 6, 2019 just minutes before the touchdown.
The ISRO chairman said, “The primary issues were: One, we had five engines which were used to reduce the velocity (called retardation). These engines developed higher thrust. When such a higher thrust was happening, the errors on account of this differential were accumulated over some period. All the errors accumulated, which was slightly higher than what we expected.
When it (lander) started to turn very fast, its ability to turn was limited by the software because we never expected such high rates to come. This was the second issue.
The third reason for failure was the small site of 500m x 500m for landing of the lander.”
Rectifying those mistakes this time, the Isro chairman said, “This time we have kept an area of 4.2 km (along the track) x 2.5 km (width) for the landing site. So, it can land anywhere, so it doesn’t limit you to target a specific point.”
Somanath said “instead of a success-based design, Isro has this time opted for a failure-based design” and focused on what all can fail and how to protect it and ensure a successful landing.
“We looked at sensor failure, engine failure, algorithm failure, calculation failure. So, there are different failure scenarios calculated and programmed inside. We did new test beds for simulation, which was not there last time. This was to look at various failure scenarios,” he explained.
The ISRO chief said the Vikram now has additional solar panels on other surfaces to ensure that it generates power no matter how it lands.
Especially impressive when taken into account that ISRO couldn't achieve the soft-landing with Chandrayaan-2 four years ago.
One of the big things they changed with this lander compared to Chandrayaan-2 was to increase the landing zone from 500mx500m to 4000mx4000m and adding more sensors and cameras to help the computer find a good landing site.
For those who didn't watch live, there was another hover phase (0 m/s descent) at 150m above the lunar surface before final commit.
The whole hover and look around thing was super impressive to me. That choice to spend mass on fuel for such maneuvers vs science instruments seems to always go to science in NASA debates and we end up with "either it will land here, or it will die." :-)
Great outcome and I look forward to the pictures sent back by the rover!
A very large number of missions to other planets have failed because they crashed on the planet. Thus anyone who is serious about getting a mission to a different planet will put a lot of effort into the landing system. The fuel burn is cheap compared to a crash landing on the moon (as Russia just had a couple days ago). The above is even at NASA, they have done a lot of complex landing systems over the years.
Most missions have several different scientific systems on board. If any one fails well the others still make the mission a partial success. If the landing system fails they all become a failure.
Just checking in here, did you find something in my writing that suggested I was being disparaging or dismissive of what an awesome accomplishment this is? If so would love to know how you got there so that I could be more clear in the future.
To neutral readers, it appears complementary — not contradictory. It adds more info about the cost of failure when trying to optimize for more science.
If you can't see it that way, try picturing the reply prefixed as "to add to that, ..."
My impression is you were trying to say too much effort and fuel was used for landing and they should have put a bit more into science. If that isn't what you meant, my mistake, but it is how I understood it.
Thanks! That helps a lot. It was not what I meant but re-reading it I can see how you got that impression. I find the orbital entry/landing phases of exploratory missions to be the most interesting technically as they always have bunch of technical challenges with engineers making trade-offs. The "sky crane" idea NASA came up with blew me away (as an example). I think the ISRO team really did a fabulous job on the landing here. Watching the numbers touch down was so delicate.
> was to increase the landing zone from 500mx500m to 4000mx4000m
Can you elaborate on this? Presumably it could land...anywhere on the moon, so what exactly does it mean to increase the landing zone? What determines where it can or can't land?
There is a target area we want to land in order to investigate certain terrain or other POI's near the target.
It obviously can't land on mountains and certain rocky or steep terrain. They know its limitations. These limitations determine where it can or can't land.
During target selection they will find an adaquet place on the surface that meets the criteria.
By increasing from 500m^2 to 4000m^2 they need to find a larger area that meets those same needs.
This also helps during the actual landing. It can aim anywhere inside that 4000m^2 area instead of being limited to just a 500m^2 area.
oh I see, so it's not that they picked the same center and said "oh btw now you can land in a larger circle around it" but rather they picked a different site altogether? that makes a lot more sense, thanks
> It is of special interest to scientists because of the occurrence of water ice in permanently shadowed areas around it. The lunar south pole region features craters that are unique in that the near-constant sunlight does not reach their interior. Such craters are cold traps that contain a fossil record of hydrogen, water ice, and other volatiles dating from the early Solar System
Chandrayaan 3 landed at around 69 degrees south latitude which isn't far enough south to access the permanently shadowed craters where large ice deposits might occur (and the Pragyan rover uses solar panels for power).
I haven't read specific reasons for choosing that site, but we have never landed that far south, and it will be interesting to see what differences (if any) there are from the more central latitudes, which is a good enough reason on its own.
It may be due to communications problems if a lander came down in one of those shadowed craters. We would not be able to communicate with it. it would probably require relay satellites around the moon to mediate that communication.
The definitive discovery of Moon water came from Chandrayaan-1 which carried with it a NASA-provided science instrument called the Moon Mineralogical Mapper—M3 for short—that observed how the surface absorbed infrared light. Using this data, M3 determined that previously suspected water molecules were ice inside the Moon’s polar craters [0].
However, the first direct evidence of water vapor near the Moon was obtained by the Apollo 14 in 1971 [0]. A series of bursts of water vapor ions were observed by the instrument mass spectrometer at the lunar surface near the Apollo 14 landing site.
NASA LCROSS confirmed it before the Indian mission (which NASA instruments also on the Indian mission confirmed first). After NASA confirmed, Indian officials came out with their own announcement
Moon undergoes extreme temperature fluctuations from day to night, resulting in boil off. There are spots on the South Pole that never see sunlight, so it’s our best bet for finding large deposits of water (as ice).
The ice would also be pretty close to the Moon's peaks of eternal light[1] where you don't have to have your solar panels spend half of every month in darkness. So basically where you'd want to live on the Moon if you had to pick somewhere.
Isn't that also related to why the Lunar Gateway (the proposed space station component of the current Artemis project at Nasa) was proposed to be in a lunar polar orbit?
It's 69° south, so it's not so much the south pole as the polar region. For reference, the major landmass of Antarctica starts around that point on Earth. McMurdo Station is at around 78° South.
Currently in a live server with others watching and it's a lot of fun. I happen to know many people working in the space industry, and a lot of great engineers come from India. Very happy and excited for India and its people. Goodluck!
If I read correctly, this is now the most watched live video on YouTube! Congratulations to India and the team on this fantastic feat of an achievement.
Economic development? Control over your own media? Surely this is not a serious question. Heck, controlling your own media and tech stack is far more important to a country like india than landing probes on the moon. Ideally india should do both. Not sure why they are lagging so far behind in the tech sector when so much of the tech industry is powered by indians.
Congratulations to everyone involved. This is amazing. India has come so far in its space program. Leaps and bounds. It’s astonishing to witness. While SpaceX has the look - Chandrayaan has the function. Now get Jeb back home!!
Unfortunately all the national space agencies seem to suffer from this. Both NASA and ESA also seem to think that people are tuning in to watch the smarmy politician talk rather than the robot making its way to space/landing on another body.
It's also because these agencies are reliant of politicians and government institutions for funding. So there is a balance between "showing what the public actually cares about" and "keeping this guy happy so we can keep up funding / congressional support / etc."
To his credit, Narendra Modi has increased ISRO's budget a lot. Many years they have received more than promised! So he kind of deserves to rake in the limelight.
On the other hand, political speeches on such occasions go down as most remembered historically. The infamous quote "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." was obviously said by some politician! (or at least with non-technical motives)
The full version of that section is more amusing but forgotten
>> But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may as well ask: why climb the highest mountain? Why 35 years ago fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? We choose to go to the moon {applause} We choose to go to the moon... {applause} 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 we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win. (And the others too)
(as spoken and delivered at Rice University in Houston, Texas, referencing the Rice-Texas American football rivalry, where Texas is a 10x larger university)
I think it is a sign of habitual cynicism that you assume "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." was said by a politician. I think people feel like they are defending themselves from being manipulated by not accepting anything on its face as sincere. Sometimes a pipe is just a pipe.
That's correct about Freud! I was referring to Magritte, who made the painting "Ceci n'est pas une pipe." By which he meant the image of the pipe was not actually not a pipe. Which means .. well I think you would have to read about it and I am not sure I am using the reference in the right way.
I believe Freud and the cigar is about our thoughts and impulses sometimes not having greater meaning in our subconscious. Magritte is about something different.
No sarcasm, just wondering. Armstrong could have been cancelled or something. I might have missed the Two Minutes Hate [0] when he or lunar exploitation was on.
Could just be a misuse of infamous but could just as well be intended to refer to the fact that Man and Mankind mean the same. You need an article in front to transform "One small step for Man" into "One small step for a man" to refer to Neil himself stepping.
Wikipedia (see elsewhere for link) has good coverage of that. "A" was intended to be said, but when humans say lines like that it is common to miss a word here and there. There is no way to know for sure if he said it and the technology of the time didn't pick it up, or if he misstated his own quote.
Exactly! This has been my own head canon too since like decades! I was actually surprised to read in this thread that "infamous" is a negative interpretation of famous which seems like a revisionist and recent interpretation. The English language also evolves through the ages and so do the meanings and interpretations.
They want to go down in the history books the way JFK's "we choose to go to the Moon" did without experiencing the "mind-blowing" event afterwards that made the speech historical.
I believe the chairman of the space agency also used the Prime Minister's mention of future projects to note it as confirmation that those projects will indeed happen i.e. be funded. That was pretty smart at @ 01:07:00 in the video.
That was very memorable- grainy photos projected on a wall while nasa admin (old white guy) briefed Biden? Jwst had a pretty well planned out program for first images including events and it just got crushed.
That is condescending nonsense. Pretty much everybody would prefer to see rocks from outer space than hearing politicians congratulating themselves and the unity of our country.
Yeah it's more likely this is a case of wants of decision makers being prioritized over wants of the audience. This event is an avalanche of prestige. Of course politicians want to soak it up.
Nope. Same reaction from a wide variety of people including my wife who's not in tech and doesn't know what HN or YCombinator are. She was like "let the team speak already!"
So what you're saying is you'd need to be an uneducated imbecile to prefer politicians speaking to live space footage.
I think you're selling uneducated imbeciles short; surely even they prefer the space footage. Only the politicians doing the speaking prefer themselves.
SpaceX livestreams didn't get super popular for having a politician on them. They got popular for showing exactly what's happening with enthusiastic presenters narrating it.
Most people find speeches and politicians boring. They wanna see rockets flying, robots moving, etc.
The first launch of SpaceX's Crew Dragon with astronauts on-board holds the record for the most concurrent internet viewers on a stream tracked by NASA at 10 million.
Of course if you drop the internet requirement, Apollo 11 still is by far the most live viewed at 600 million viewers.
That makes sense for Apollo 11. I expect that one won't be beat until we land people on Mars. I figured SpaceX had some much bigger viewerships than 10's of thousands. (I've watched several myself.) That number must have been on the more (now) regular things like vertical landing the same rocket for the Nth time! Thank you for the update.
The whole Prime Minister thing was bizarre to me .. He was like on the mission-control screen with his own panel .. it was just weird lol.. Even in the US where our presidents fancy themselves god's.. it still just had a weird perception from my point of view..
But I'm proud of the people that worked on and executed that mission for them. Obviously a moment of immense national pride, well deserved.
ISRO is primary arm of the Department of Space which is headed by the Prime Minister. So in essence, the Prime Minister is the boss. It is not an independent federal agency like NASA.
I really wish to see a lander mission to Venus. Doesn't look like anybody other than Russia has done it - that too nearly 40 years ago. The environment is so extreme that the technology - especially electronics - would have to be radically different. The data is also likely to be extremely interesting.
You can see the onboard camera view in the background sometimes. And the only truly hard thing about this is getting the political will for the funding, so.
I absolutely agree that they should immediately release data & images for more technically inclined section. However the reason for speeches is entire nation is watching this event across all age group, most of them don't understand technical things, I would say even image of moon surface wont connect to most of them. Basically speeches is the way to connect & artists impression images. To give some example, people thing entire rocket goes to moon, one of the politician was wishing "passengers" on the spacecraft, reputed news channel claiming "breaking new" that there wont be delay in landing as if we can push breaks like in car or traffic on the way. So you get the point, to connect to masses they are speaking in language that everyone understand
One of the most populous countries has become a strong contender in space exploration. Hopefully, it will inspire so many more Indians to push it further and elevate the humanity, just like USA and USSR once did. It's great.
NASA often gets the same treatment, particularly so during the Apollo program when they were getting a lot of money. It doesn't matter the country, a lot of people don't see the sense in spending a single pence on space.
One of my favorite quotes is, "When a wise man points at the moon the imbecile examines the finger." So pertinent, but also with so absurdly much imagery, symbolism, and metaphor packed into just a few words. But perhaps the most remarkable thing is that that quote's 2500 years old. Technology changes so much, but we largely seem to be the exact same people we were even thousands of years in the past.
Congratulations to India! Every time I read of launches to space, I think (and sometimes say aloud) "wow!" It is awesome in the traditional sense of the world.
It’s brilliant! I think most Indians were really disappointed after the last failure, so it’s really reassuring that despite shooting further we were successful!
I get the point that the US already put people on the moon… but how can you possibly make the leap that there can be no scientific value to additional unmanned laboratories and instruments landing on the moon? Especially since this represents increasing the number of countries who can contribute to this scientific endeavor? If the US elects a president who is not interested in lunar science or has economic problems, then the whole world must wait for the US to decide to resume lunar missions?
An overview of the scientific instruments onboard:
“ Lander payloads: Chandra’s Surface Thermophysical Experiment (ChaSTE) to measure the thermal conductivity and temperature; Instrument for Lunar Seismic Activity (ILSA) for measuring the seismicity around the landing site; Langmuir Probe (LP) to estimate the plasma density and its variations. A passive Laser Retroreflector Array from NASA is accommodated for lunar laser ranging studies.
Rover payloads: Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer (APXS) and Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscope (LIBS) for deriving the elemental composition in the vicinity of landing site.
Chandrayaan-3 consists of an indigenous Lander module (LM), Propulsion module (PM) and a Rover with an objective of developing and demonstrating new technologies required for Inter planetary missions. The Lander will have the capability to soft land at a specified lunar site and deploy the Rover which will carry out in-situ chemical analysis of the lunar surface during the course of its mobility. The Lander and the Rover have scientific payloads to carry out experiments on the lunar surface. The main function of PM is to carry the LM from launch vehicle injection till final lunar 100 km circular polar orbit and separate the LM from PM. Apart from this, the Propulsion Module also has one scientific payload as a value addition which will be operated post separation of Lander Module.”
> I get the point that the US already put people on the moon
I didn't mention the US and I'm not from the US (I'm French). Humanity landed on the moon. Over 50 years ago.
If a country today built a 1969 computer I wouldn't marvel at the achievement.
And yes, sure, there are probably many instruments on board. But you can tell from the video -- and all the excitement here as well -- that this is mainly political and politically motivated.
> If the US elects a president who is not interested in lunar science or has economic problems, then the whole world must wait for the US to decide to resume lunar missions?
Or maybe do something else with our limited time and ressources than trying again to analyze the lunar surface and pretend it will be useful? While planting friggin' flags all over the place?
Of course we should? I'm surprised you think otherwise. It's like arguing that we shouldn't have explored the Americas because the Earth was not unexplored.
The Lunar poles have lots of scientific value, particularly for long term habitation, as you can have both permanently shadowed craters with water ice in them and permanently lit areas providing a reliable source of power.
I'm not very familiar with this source [0], but it states "ESA was providing support to the Chandrayaan-3 mission from three of its ground stations located in Kourou (French Guiana), Goonhilly (United Kingdom), and New Norcia (Western Australia)." Although BIK doesn't obviously map to any of those.
“ISRO and LAPAN have had a long history of collaboration, with ISRO owning a ground station on the Indonesian island of Biak, which has supported many of India’s launches.”
I was trying to find the schedule for the rover including on ISRO's website[1], but the closest I could find was this[2] and this[3] that suggest the rover will be rolled out in the next few hours or may be tomorrow and it has a life expectancy of one lunar day(14 earth days). Anyone knows if it will be streamed as well?
The lander external view is simulation, but they have a camera (Lander Imager Display) looking downwards that is transmitting live photos every couple of seconds (center, top right on the main screen).
Though it's disappointing to see simulation, it makes sense as there is no external vehicle to capture the live video and stream it. The lander cameras are showing realistic video though.
In principle, it should be clearly stated which is real and which is sim.
Definitely no footage, at most maybe a picture if it lands successfully.
The only footage we have of any spacecraft landing anywhere other than Earth is either from Apollo or the Perseverance skycrane deployment. If they do have footage, it'll be like the latter, retrieved after the fact.
but seriously why would they not? If they have something nice to show of why not? This is publicly paid project (by indian tax payers) that is political in its nature. Why not show as much as possible?
Don't think of Brain Drain as a lose lose situation. Lot of Indians who leave India contribute in many ways and in fact bring tons of knowledge and skills from the global world back to India (even if they don't live there physically). Not to mention that amount of money that is exchanged by Non Resident Indians (also known as NRIs).
It is good that Indians are able to go aboard and bring a globalized knowledge back to India.
It’s going to be very hard to brain drain a country of 1.4 billion people. That doesn’t even take into account the massive amount of money the diaspora sends back. The above is usually an argument people make when they don’t want to let immigrants into their country.
This is a big achievement for India. Not just in space exploration point of view but the side effects of such projects are more interesting.
Dozens of major private companies focused on making this success making various spare parts including steel cranes by Tata steel, special alloys of Mishra Dhatu Nigam (The Alloy Company), wings by L&T Aero etc. etc. I know some people here and they were so proud and focused on "excellence" which I think is often missing in what we Indians normally do.
Space programs are important because of precision required. It created a discipline and desire for perfection not just for ISRO but for all their suppliers and vendors. Hope this habit spreads.
There are some very interesting, and arguably more challenging missions coming up including a Venus orbiter, manned space flight and a Martian lander. This should really help solidify the manufacturing space around this.
When I look at this, it seems it's a long-range optical feed of the moon surface with lander graphics laid over it. Has anyone found footage of the actual craft touching down? It would be amazing to see.
Not sure if you're joking.. but there's light on the dark side of the Moon, it's just called that because it's never visible from Earth.
I assumed the craft that brought the lander into orbit would have some sort of visual tracking, but maybe the distances involved make that impossible and all we get is telemetry + a rendering to visualize it.
I am hoping that the lander has some ultra high definition video but because of bandwidth we haven't seen it yet but as soon as the upload to earth is complete I am hoping we get a much higher resolution video of this landing.
I was thinking more about a recorder positioned on earth or on orbit, but I forgot about the main stage of the ship that deploys the probe and should have visibility of the dark side.
A look at the previous lunar missions [1] should give an idea. There have been 7 lander missions since 1976 (not including impactors):
- 3 by China: All success
- 1 by Japan (along with a rover from UAE): Failed
- 1 by Israel: Failed
- 1 by Russia: Failed
- 2 by India: Previous one failed. This one succeeded
I can see why the entire world would be excited by something like this. I hope that there will be routine landings by different players and that the landing guidance would be perfected.
There was a fervent space race before that. Do you believe that anybody forgot about the countless interplanetary missions before that? Every time someone tries to collect data points, someone like you will start accusing vested interests rather than argue the reasons behind the data.
Edit: Added later:
Consider these questions:
1. Russia's lunar missions were all done in 18 years until Luna 24. Why did they then wait 47 years for Luna 25?
2. The US's last lander mission and manned mission was in 1972 (Apollo 17). Why do they want to restart it again after waiting more than half a century?
Or am I making this up too? The simple fact is that the current lunar missions are undertaken by an entirely new generation. Those from 1976 has long retired. That's good enough to consider them as two separate timelines.
Assuming that CY3 landed somewhere it gets eternal sunlight, I can see how this can be an issue. Many landers and rovers have horizontal solar panels - they would work as long as the sun is reasonably above the horizon. However, the sun is always going to be near the horizon at the poles. That would not only require the solar panel to be mounted vertically, but also be oriented towards the sun somehow.
This is the first time India soft-landed anything outside of Earth. That by itself is a big deal. Soft-landing guidance on a body without atmosphere is much more complex than launch guidance.
Russian space program is a shadow of what it once was. Their history is full of daring missions and extraordinary achievements. I wish they would engage in a space race than in a war.
American space program is a shadow of what it once was. Their history is full of daring missions and extraordinary achievements. I wish they would engage in a space race rather than constant illegal, brutal, destructive and absolutely unnecessary war.
It isn't really the gotcha you think it is when you see Falcon 9s flying and landing multiple times a week, the most advanced conventional rocket engines ever being mass produced, two scifi-esque lunar landers under serious development and all the other things.
The American space program is far and away the world leader by a huge margin, while almost 2 decades ago things were dicey, the current Ameircan space program is definitely befitting of its glory during the mid/late 19th century.
I agree with everything you wrote. But you missed my point - America has an incredible space program despite their wars. If wars were the cause of space program degradation, Russia would actually be ahead.
I'm not a supporter of war mongering by any country. And what I hoped for Russia is what I hope of the entire world. But the assumption that the impact of their war efforts on their economy are similar is completely wrong. Russian economy is in shambles due to it while America goes on as usual.
Might be time for China to reconsider its role with Russia in future manned moon missions. Any prestige the Russian program once had has long since faded, even ground operations at Baikonur are now at risk with equipment being impounded by bailiffs from Kazakhstan to service billions in debt.
Russia retains an (rapidly diminishing) edge in certain areas of space. One of them is engine design. China is still keen on buying the best Soviet engines, namely Energia's RD-170 and its variants but of course Russia is less than keen on parting ways with them.
Even CALT, the major launch vehicle provider in China, admits it will be well into the late 2020s/early 2030s before they can get an engine as good as the RD-170. Their YF-130, while technically very good according to recent tests, is still a bit less efficient. Think about that, a 40 year gap. Aerospace is hard.
Using Russian engines, like the ISS collaboration was an attempt by the US to keep soviet rocket scientists in business in civilian roles so they wouldn't be incentivized to spread around the world proliferating ICBM tech.
In the process the US paid a huge price (decay of domestic design capability) and it's debatable if the goal was achieved.
Edit: Thankfully the decay has been made up for over recent years with the boom in private launch companies and of course, SpaceX's work.
Coincidentally, China's first Mars (orbiter) mission Yinghuo-1 failed because it was hitchhiking on the Russian orbiter Fobos-Grunt that failed in an Earth orbit. India launched an orbiter soon afterwards and became the first country to get it right in the first attempt.
They also created a bunch of tech that Americans thought impossible at the time - especially the staged combustion cycle with oxygen-rich preburner. And the American space programme too had its share of human losses due to sheer hubris - the 2 shuttle disasters included and possibly Apollo 1 as well. Let's not understate the achievements of the Russian space engineers and the bravery of their astronauts just because of the current political situation.
This is a big deal because since 1976, only China has (edit: had!) managed to land something successfully on the Moon. And also space exploration is cool in general.
So the mission alone is unimpressive in your opinion? If you were to weed out who did this and only focus on the what, would you not have an inch of wonder and applaud the efforts?
That's not what my comment says. Personally I don't know how impressive or unimpressive the mission is since I am not interested in space exploration and I know almost nothing about it.
Welcome to humanity - we use our feelings and emotions, often. We're not data ingesting algorithms looking to score a piece of text with an objective metric, and that's the way we like it :)
You might see it manifesting as extra attention towards topics such as minority rights, or injustices, or celebrities, or products from companies we like, or up-voting tiny open source projects that we nevertheless think are cool.
I'd be curious if it's at all interesting from a technical perspective. It was impressive in the 60s and 70s because a lot of new things needed to be discovered and understood to make it happen. But now a days.. are there really technical aspects that would not be covered in a typical engineering course?
I get it's very expensive and hence difficult to pull off - but this makes it comes off as mostly nationalism and a big display of disposable income (which for a country with so much poverty is .. something)
It's a common perspective. My personal experience (working in the defense sector) is that these kinds of endeavors end up tieing up a lot of very smart doing vanity projects that in effect don't "generate value" for society. All the people involved wouldn't just be sitting on their hands if the moon project didn't exist. But I guess it could be worse.. they could be working on moving money around or pushing ads on to people
Technically no one has landed in the crater ridden South pole on the dark side of the moon. Scientifically it's useful to course these uncharted parts of the moon both for water/ice and mineral composition.
I don't see how poverty comes into play here: every nation had similar issues when they were doing space exploration. They are two unrelated spheres. Solving one doesn't mean the other won't be
What typical engineering course covers the design of reliable systems which work mostly autonomously in environments with huge temperature variations, vacuum, inaccessibility for repair, significant radiation, mass constraints, sensor limitations etc?
Designing stuff for space involves a lot of challenges that typical engineering does not.
Plus, while the US and USSR may have done the necessary technical work, India doesn't get most of that knowledge and thus has to learn the lessons itself.
A nation isn't a singular-minded entity; rather, it comprises diverse citizens who assume various roles and contribute uniquely to global improvement. Just because they've successfully landed a rover on the moon doesn't imply the abandonment of all efforts to alleviate poverty.
Honestly, why does the recognition of India's positive accomplishments always seem overshadowed by the specter of poverty and other challenges? Did the Americans eradicate every societal issue before embarking on their lunar mission? Indians should be proud — this accomplishment is truly remarkable and signifies positive societal strides toward a better collective future. Such achievements ignite hope, and progress is fundamentally built upon hope, regardless of the symbolic origins it might stem from.
An alternative perspective to consider, what happens to all the skilled engineers interested in and capable of working on advanced technologies like those intended for space if a country decides to put all other development on hold to singlemindedly focus on eradicating poverty?
What would happen to the next generations of talented potential engineers? What value would there be to pursuing an advanced education? Since obviously a space program isn't the only "luxury" that should be put on hold if poverty exists!
The talent would all leave and the next generations would be less incentivized to pursue the very kinds of careers that help a country develop.
India has a space program since 70s. It has a sent moon missions thrice now, one mars mission and has an upcoming sun probe too. It has a polar orbit launch vehicle which has one of the safest record in the world. Cost wise, it is pretty effective for satellite launched
Landing on the Moon isn't easy and making it on the second try is pretty good, it took the USSR tons of tries to finally get a good soft landing. And recently we've seen groups from Russia, Japan, and Israel try to land softly on the moon without success.
Any space mission is fairly complex no matter the agency private or public.
For me the most interesting part to watch personally was the telemetry. What's the latency involved here, do they have agency in terms of manual overrides and intervention in case things go wrong?
What does RTT look like, are there more efficient encoding of data to allow minimal information?
Latency is dominated by speed of light delays, which are about 2.5 seconds round trip. Encoding is generally more concerned with data integrity than data minimization.
I'm not sure about the details of this mission and whether the Indians have negotiated usage of the Deep Space Network, but with the large antennas of the DSN multi megabit rates are quite achievable.
It will be cool to send a buddy drone with these landers. A minute or so before the touch down, detach from lander and shoot the landing. Then go back and attach with lander for charging and do periodic flights.
The sensor data is a reliable low-entropy indicator. The engines are probably cutoff based on the same data (most probably a set of load sensors on the legs). If the data indicates that the engine has cutoff, the craft is stationary and if the data is still streaming, then it's a pretty good indicator that it worked as expected. I would trust it more than the video - especially when the video is lagging heavily.
PS: I have worked extensively on something related. Video is good to have and helps in post-flight analysis. However, it can also mislead sometimes. Sensor data gives you a much clearer initial picture.
This happens a lot to me in KSP, the lander tends to slide all the way to the bottom of the slope. Most of the time it's okay, just need to tweak the dampeners on the landing legs a bit ;)
EDIT: I went to re-watch the moment on youtube and it does seem like the lander moves slightly to the left!
Chandrayaan 2 had 3 payloads. The lander crashed along with rover. But the orbiter is still functioning. It has 8 scientific instruments on board for various observations of lunar surface.
> The Moon has been on a role eating landers and space probes lately.
The complexity of landing on the moon is somewhere between that of launching a spacecraft and that of a self-driving car. It's sad that so many landers were lost - it would have been heartbreaking for those who built them. But I hope that they attempt it again and perfect this complex task.
Interesting how close politicians are with anything related to the moon. Nixon on TV as much as the astronauts in 69, Modi on TV here. Both during massive consolidations of power towards the leaders who also have major corruption scandals.
What makes this a "WoWW!", is not that this is the first time humans sent something to the moon, but when one factors in the budget relative to others.
Although, I do not have reference for what the exact budget was/is.
I don't know much about landing extraterrestrial missions, but I would imagine that the moment of touchdown is exactly the moment everyone in the control room should be keenly paying attention to their assignment instead of jumping up to celebrate (or at least try not to distract those that are). Because if that thing sunk into a pool of moon water or landed on top of another lunar lander, it would be 15 minutes before anyone realized. Just a minor layman observation.
Anyhow congratulations to this team and to the people of this great nation.
They are showing it sometimes, with a camera pointed at that screen - the one to the left of the big numbers with velocities. There's also a simulated view that shows the surface (the second big screen from the left).
Despite all the sour comments trying to find fault and criticize, this is a remarkable achievement, especially on the heels of the failed Chandrayaan-2 mission. Congrats to the team!!! Just 4 years to recover from the failure and achieve a phenomenal success. India just keeps executing despite what others may say.
The team deserves even more praise to be able to achieve these wins with limited resources.
>It has been a miracle of cost effectiveness. This is a wonder on its own.
India has the third highest global GDP by PPP. This is incredibly powerful when you invest in your citizens education the way they have, as the cost of anything like this ends up coming down to skilled labor prices. Their number one competitive advantage at this point is human capital.
Yea, back originally when the SLS was on the drawing board to be made it was supposed to be the safest ROI and it hasn’t even been launched successfully yet .
> It also ironic that a country and population seen as backwards by the British Empire have overtaken the British in landing on the moon.
This is not the moment to go there, but still since we're on the topic, current leaders of Britain (Prime Minister), Ireland (Taoiseach) and Scotland (First Minister) are all of Indian-Subcontinent origin. Britain and Ireland have leaders of Indian origin, while Scotland has of Pakistani origin.
Sunak and Yousaf are both Punjabi, Sunak's family was from Gujranwala region in Pakistani Punjab before partition and Yousaf's is from Khanewal in Pakistani Punjab as well, plus both are the children of East African Indians who moved to the UK during the mass expulsion of South Asians in the 1960s and 70s (Freddie Mercury is also part of that community as well, though ethnically Parsi Gujarati). Also, they both attended elite Grammar Schools, so they were within the same Old Boys network.
They're much closer culturally than Varadkar who's dad's side of the family is from Konkan region (the coastal region stretching from Goa to Mumbai/Bombay)
Stevenage produces tiny satellites, but as long as prices are jacked up, anyone can claim its a big industry.
Mr Pillinger is a lovely bloke, but firing a giant zorb ball onto a distance planet or moon, isnt exactly rocket science is it?
There’s a novel Artemis by Andy Weir where Africa became the place to launch transports to the Moon. I’d happy for them if they managed to turn things around.
When you whole Internet personality is being obnoxious… I’m sorry you’re the way you’re. But do you really think you contribute something to discussion with your comment?
Agreed, Russia shouldn't get a pass just because "space" given all the ways they have shown total disregard for everyone else.
Their war set back many international cooperations, they've destroyed Ukraine’s space industry, they stole satellites, launches for which had been paid for, only to turn around and put absurd conditions to launch them, and under Rogozin they showed blatant disregard for NASAs attempts to keep the ISS cooperation neutral.
The Prime Minister is the head of Department of Space, whose primary arm is ISRO. He is the boss. Literally every Prime Minister of India has attended ISRO launches and addressed ISRO after success/failure of launches.
> asked Modi to "bless us"
You probably aren't Indian but this is quite common in India where we seek blessings from elders.
That might have been an issue with the control room getting the timing of the live feed wrong. No reason to read into it more than that. We have had previous missions where the Prime Minister's live feed was beamed after the event concluded
No, he's just an elected representative of the people, a government servant.
> You probably aren't an Indian
I am an Indian.
Modi, desperate to project himself, is overruling the President (who is the supreme commander of the armed forces), gotten himself "coronated" in the new Parliament building, gotten his picture put on every citizen's COVID vaccination certificate (as if he has invented the vaccine).
PM is not the boss of the executive according to the constitution*. The fact that traditionally and more recently the President follows the whim of the PM does not negate the text that identifies the elected President as the head of the executive.
> identifies the elected President as the head of the executive.
Wrong. He is a "nominal head", or in other words, "in name only". The powers are vested in the Prime Minister not the President. So it does not make him the head of the executive. Read Article 53 (3)a of Indian Constitution which overrides 53(1) and resolves any ambiguity: https://indiankanoon.org/doc/1597349/
(3) Nothing in this article shall
(a) be deemed to transfer to the President any functions conferred by any existing law on the Government of any State or other authority;
So the authority of Prime Minister, as defined by the Constitution, cannot be transferred to the President, even though he is a nominal head. This is as per 53 (3)a.
"(1) There shall be a Council of Ministers with the Prime Minister at the head to aid and advise the President who shall, in the exercise of his functions, act in accordance with such advice: Provided that the President may require the council of Ministers to reconsider such advice, either generally or otherwise, and the President shall act in accordance with the advice tendered after such reconsideration"
Which means the President can only ask for advice (from PM + Council of Ministers) to be reconsidered, and after reconsideration, he still has to act on the advice. He cannot overrule it. Hence why a Bill can be passed by Parliament and sent back by President to be reconsidered only once. The second time the Bill is sent, the President is duty bound to assent else he can be impeached. The Prime Minister on the other hand cannot be impeached. The ruling Government can be brought down with a no-confidence motion or if enough members from ruling party defect. No other way to impeach a Prime Minister.
Also read Article 77:
77. (1) All executive action of the Government of
India shall be expressed to be taken in the name of the
President.
It is pretty clear that he has no "real" executive powers and is head in "name" only as the Government is taking actions in his name. The executive power rests with Government of India whose head is the Prime Minister.
It is also even more undermined by the fact that the President is not directly elected by the people (like in US where people vote for the President and representative votes are cast through their electoral college) but through an electoral college consisting of the elected representatives of the People. He has no real executive powers vested in him unlike the President of USA who can pass executive orders.
Tell me one executive order passed by President of India directly and unilaterally. There are none.
> No, he's just an elected representative of the people, a government servant.
And he still is the boss of DoS whose arm is ISRO. You can cry all you want, it won't change facts.
> Modi, desperate to project himself, is overruling the President (who is the supreme commander of the armed forces), gotten himself "coronated" in the new Parliament building, gotten his picture put on every citizen's COVID vaccination certificate (as if he has invented the vaccine).
I cracked up at the little flag waving by who I assume was the prime minister/president. The duality is interesting serious Indian scientists doing great work and a politician on the screen for no good reason. Here’s to the tribe of scientist prevailing and taking the country forward, prob true everywhere now that I think of it.
> The duality is interesting serious Indian scientists doing great work and a politician on the screen for no good reason
One can say the same about President Nixon talking to the Astronauts who landed on the Moon. At least here ISRO comes directly under the Prime Minister of India while NASA does not come under the President of USA.
I get this is tongue in cheek, and it's true that everyone's brown, but a couple of points of note:
1. ISRO has reserved spots for Scheduled Castes / Tribes (historically under-represented castes and tribes), which is far more explicit than having a DEI committee [1]
2. There are probably 10-15 primary languages spoken across the teams given regional differences in India. I would guess society is closer to EU than US in terms of homogeneity but that's pure speculation.
No opinion on whether or not it helps anyone soft-land on the moon, though.
It was tongue in cheek, and you make a great point, the idea every Indian or every European is the same is absurd.
That said, my comment was pointed more towards NASA and the West generally. I have been getting the sense that NASA don't like the demographic of their organisation very much lately which I think is sad given their accomplishments. Were this a video from a NASA control center I expect a lot of people would be commenting on the colour of people's skin and that's a shame. I have been rightly downvoted here for this.
My comment was in poor taste, but I saw an opportunity to poke fun at the absurdity of the Western view of diversity. For whatever reason I've noticed we seem able to recognise the absurdity of the claims we make about diversity when it's not in a Western context. Eg, the idea that to be successful at anything you need people with different skin colours involved is clearly not true – and it's sad this idea is even being entertained by an organisation as well respected as NASA. They should care about hiring the best individuals the US has to offer. At least in my opinion.
Yes, I think they described it as 'peanuts'. It's in the form of investment as well, but if they don't want it and we can't afford it, it's odd that it carries on. I'm sure it's a complex matter.
I mean, we certainly can afford it, far more so than e.g. PPE Medpro, but it's worth questioning what it's actually for. Which will require more granularity than "India", since it's not going to the Indian government.
From a Guardian article: A Foreign Office spokesperson said: “Since 2015 the UK has given no financial aid to the government of India. Most of our funding now is focused on business investments which help create new markets and jobs for the UK, as well as India. UK investments are also helping tackle shared challenges such as climate change.”
> Some may argue that such endeavors push technological boundaries, inspire global scientific collaboration, and prepare humanity for existential threats.
It is widely known, not “some may argue”.
> However, considering the vast resources assigned for a mission with no direct immediate benefits to Earth's current problems, one could argue that our focus should be redirected towards addressing environmental crises, poverty, and global health challenges on Earth first
While I appreciate your engagement with the topic, I must point out that the notion that we can 'tackle both' is a dangerously simplistic perspective. The resources—both financial and intellectual—that are poured into space exploration are not infinite and come at the expense of urgent, life-saving initiatives here on Earth. To say it's 'widely known' only underscores the normalization of this skewed prioritization. We're not living in a utopia where all problems can be solved simultaneously; we're in a world where choices have consequences. The urgency of our Earth-bound crises doesn't afford us the luxury of romanticizing space exploration as if it's without trade-offs.
If you're looking for wasteful effort to direct elsewhere, I suggest reducing the money spent on social media, advertising, sport, movies and so on before space exploration.
It is almost like some fields try to drive off as many people as possible from lack of opportunity, to having extreme requirements and being driven by politics.
The country that first visited the Moon should have explored the lunar south pole decades ago. Then the dark side of the moon. Then a manned colony.
Instead we are beaten by a foreign nation to the south pole. And our next project is a manned landing on the moon, which we already accomplished in the 1960s.
Great to see other countries making accomplishments in space, I don’t see a cause for embarrassment when we’re driving rovers and helicopters around on Mars.
What made them make that decision? Was it like "lets be as precise as we can because we want to get to the spot X because X is special" and thus "Lets let the software always compensate for any errors to get to X". I am assuming that even at this point they tested the software for extreme conditions. It is most likely that once this assumption was made the Software was built that way, i.e: "Lets test the Software can always correct for any issues to get to X with feedback(like thrust)". It trades off Safety for Accuracy(to hit X).
This time the idea was "Lets select a trajectory to X" but this time "We will let the software prioritize safety(altitude, speed and heading) to be within norm once we start descending towards X". And additionally "Not make any corrections if we are somehow too far off X if it exceeds safety limits". It trades off Accuracy(to hit X) for Safety.