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Chandrayaan Enters Lunar Orbit
William Robinson writes "After an 18-day journey, Chandrayaan-1, the moon mission of India, has entered Lunar orbit. The maneuver was described as crucial and critical by scientists, who pointed out that at least 30 per cent of similar moon missions had failed at this juncture, resulting in spacecraft lost to outer space. The lunar orbit insertion placed Chandrayaan-1 in an elliptical orbit with its nearest point 400 to 500 kilometers away from the moon, and the farthest, 7,500 kilometers. By November 15, the spacecraft is expected to be orbiting the moon at a distance of 100 kilometers and sending back data and images (the camera was tested with shots looking back at Earth). The Chandrayaan-1 is also scheduled to send a probe to the moon's surface."
In Soviet Russia, old Koreans... ...ah crap, wrong joke!
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
First Indian
Too bad the Moon's just one big tourist trap now.
The size of the craft, at over 1300 kg, is a big honking'* thing. I wonder what kind of tracking systems they are using.
*Honkin' is a technical term.
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Any problem can be made unsolvable if there are enough meetings made to discuss it.
From the linked article: "The spacecraft will make observations from the initial orbit, and then the orbit will be lowered a 100 km circular polar orbit. Following this, the Moon Impact Probe (MIP) will be ejected, impacting the lunar surface."
I going to give my car a new name... Instead of "the old Honda Civic", I'm going to call it the "Car Impact Probe" ...that way I can justify all of my accidents as being for science's sake.
It's only a matter of time now before Indians discover Lawn Darts and color television!
I guess its only a matter of time before you discover...you are an a**h*le...
You know, India is one of the most cutting edge countries in a lot research fields. Glaring back at the USA do we not having starving and homeless? Just because we trade their tribal suffering for urban suffering doesn't mean either countries don't have the same problems. Even more so I'd say China is hardly a third world country. It's economic growth will soon put it on top of the USA. You just see culturally different nations as "third world" Is Sweeden third world too with all their socialism?
countries like China and India shouldn't do space missions.
Of course they should...how else are we going to get a curry or chinese take-away when we visit the moonbase?
Smivs on the intertubes!
Is Sweeden third world too with all their socialism?
of course not, socialism puts the "wee!!!" in Sweeden
... this blows the 'turtles all the way down' model of orbital mechanics right out of the water.
Have gnu, will travel.
It's just little plastic models and Photoshop!
No sig today...
I see mostly jokes about this story, but I give India a high five! This is a HUGE accomplishment. Not just for India, for the entire world. More countries are getting into space! I hope people will realize that progress is essential and fantastic, regardless of where it happens.
The scientific community will certainly not stay hindi-fferent to this expansion of India's science curry-culum!
The ISRO site has a page on how the orbits look like in the Mission Sequence page.
And to anybody still complaining about India spending money on its space mission when 500 million people are in poverty, you are not the first.
I can just agree. It is interesting, now that we are driven more by economic interests than politic agenda the space exploration is expanding all around the world. India, China and some other folks surely. I mean, India has kind an astonishing commertial satelite launch program and they are expanding. That's globalization, but I still wonder how the american ego can live with this? When is the moon going to be bombed next? (after colonzation)
The lunar orbit insertion placed Chandrayaan-1 in an elliptical orbit with its nearest point 400 to 500 kilometers away from the moon, and the farthest, 7,500 kilometers.
HAH!! UNDER 9000!!!!
You let him convince you to try catching the lawn darts? Sheesh, no wonder...
But yeah, that '60s era game is fun despite the dangers if you play it properly.
Aside from the troll, he has sort of a point. India has massive inequality problems, is still haunted by the caste system (perhaps the only advantage of Mao was he got rid of equivalent crap from China, at quite steep a cost).
Its possible space technology will filter down and help the poorest people, but somehow I doubt it. If you want to look beyond the western media fawning over India's neoliberal development, look up the 'Naxalite' and 'Salwa Judum'. It isn't all roses and tech support over there.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
"There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere."
-- Isaac Asimov
Shall we point out that India is also a nuclear power and has three times the population of the USA?
Hopefully this is all prelude to an effort to find/extract He3 from the moon. As such the USA, India, China, Russia, etc. should be working as a team, not against each other. Energy/climate problems are global and don't stop at national boundaries.
No sig today...
Governments need to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. They invariably have to. Given this, arguing that there's some other problem that needs to be addressed is never a valid argument against any other action the government might do, save in those cases where that other problem prevents the action. Devoting a majority of your resources to a major problem is often a good idea. Devoting all of your resources to a major problem is almost never a good idea. That just tends to create more major problems, while only minor improvement to the state of the first.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
A remote working job that wasn't farmed out overseas... oh, wait
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
"Thank you. Come again!"
We do not have anyone in the US "starving." We have these government programs called WIC and Food Stamps and welfare. You know, the ones used by people in front of you at the supermarket yacking into cellphones that are nicer than yours?
Quite the contrary, the real problem with the poor in America is obesity, not starvation.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
WE CAN HAS THE MOON ORBIT!!
If you're having a hard time making out the image, it might be because the image is flipped, as though looking at it in a mirror. Emily Lakdawalla over at the Planetary Society blog figured this out and has flipped the image for us (see below). Why is the original image backwards? Emily explains, "Data doesn't come down from spacecraft in familiar formats like JPEG or TIFF; it's a stream of ones and zeroes, with a format unique to the science instrument, and scientists and engineers write their own software for translating that into raw image data. There are varying conventions for whether bits are written right or left, and if you take that raw image data and open it up in a piece of off-the-shelf image processing software, the image might be backwards." As Emily says, the error is not really important.
Wow, who fucking cares. Just flip it, who cares how their internal format represents the image. The BMP format is vertically flipped, does anyone care or convert BMP images so that they appear flipped vertically? No, nobody cares, god damnit, so why make half of the bloody article about it?
You just got troll'd!
Because he mixes it with love and makes the world taste good.
Posted as AC for reasons that should be very very obvious.
There are currently three spacecraft orbiting the moon. Japanese Kayuga/Selene, Chinese Chang'e and now Chandrayaan. Approximate budgets:
# Chandrayaan-I (India) - $86m
# Chang'e (China) - $187m
# Kayuga (Japan) - $480m
NASA is about to follow up with its own, mid-2009
# LRO - around half a billion ?
China and Japan have announced followup lander missions as well, and there is Google Lunar X-Prize card too, so the next lunar landing will be likely be done by one of these parties ( The last one was by USSR, back in 1976 )
Moon, while basically neglected for past few decades ( with notable exceptions of ESA Smart-1 and american low-budget Clementine and Lunar Prospector ), is about to get quite crowded.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.slashdot.org Errors found while checking this document as HTML5!
Since NASA seems to be stuck in the tar pit of safety, security and budget cuts, it's highly unlikely to see any of 'minor but constant' progress from them - they can only afford a few highly outstanding projects that must be polished till they shine, because any failure is unacceptable, and which are scheduled for dates like 2015, 2030 or so. They can't afford what was a standard 'in the early days', 50 failed tests in a row, a lot of improvisation and fixing problems as they appear. Back then, when a $1mln piece of equipment got destroyed, you built another and slapped an additional $500 subsystem on top of it. Currently you build a $1mln piece of equipment with a $20mln fault-prevention subsystem and it will not fail, at least in theory. Which takes maybe half the money but 10 times as much time than 40 iterations of the $1mln 'retry' method.
Russia is stuck with commercial. They do a lot of it and are great at it, cheap, fast, simple, tested thousands of time in practice, with small iterative improvements but without any huge breakthroughs, not much science is being done.
It's China and India that push for scientific advances, big and fast. They took a sprint in the race to catch up, and they are really the motor of the progress, budget is subject for negotiation, deadlines are not, if it fails, that's okay, we just try again, prevent 90% of expected accidents and hope for the best about the remaining 10%, make prayers and sacrifices to Murphy and prefer to have a half-working solution in a month than a fully-working one in five years.
Some astronauts will lose lives.
Billions of dollars worth of equipment will become junk.
But the science will be getting done, and on good schedule. (for the people who are still alive)
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Actually, just to remind, India has already commenced work on Chandrayaan-2, which will soft-land a rover on the Moon.
http://www.chandrayaan-i.com/chandrayaan2/index2.html
This mission should happen in just over 3 years. Here is the countdown clock:
http://www.chandrayaan-i.com/chandrayaan2/when2.html
Can we now safely assume there are no obvious alien artifacts on the Moon, which are kept secret?
Why's the far side of the Moon so neglected? Intuition makes me think it would have its uses like the near side, because it's shielded from Earth. Though, I suppose communication would need a satellite router.
Actually, the correct figure as of this year is more like 25%. Get your facts right before you express your hatred for brown people.
then perhaps the U.S. should shelf all fundamental research until we get our poverty level down to at least as low as Eastern Europe. it helps no one to point fingers at others whiles our own domestic problems continue to go ignored.
also, if we get rid of all fundamental research, where do you recommend scientists & researchers go for employment? are they all going to be re-trained in order to find a place in a society without fundamental scientific research? or should they start a mass exodus of intellectual/scientific talent out of the U.S.?
what effect do you think abolishing public research will have on a society? if people are discouraged from going into the sciences & exploratory research, what effect will that have on our national culture? we already live in society rife with anti-intellectualism and reactionary attitudes. do you really think cutting all funding for fundamental science & public research is going to have a positive social effect on either the U.S. or India?
we fund public research in fundamental science not because it strokes our national ego, or as part of some lofty abstract idealistic goal, but because public research is vital to societal progress. it not only drives a society forward technologically, but it also fosters an intellectual culture and encourages rational thought. when you do away with fundamental research, you're killing the pursuit of knowledge, and that will simply invite intellectual & cultural stagnation.
Who exactly did parent flame? Stop abusing your moderation privileges.
My loony bun is fine, Benny Lava.
Minor bun engine made, Benny Lava!
Have you been high today?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZA1NoOOoaNw
The pic in the first linked article is a shot of the Apollo 11 lander approaching the orbiter while returning from the lunar surface. Besides, how does the Chandrayaan orbiter take a picture of itself in lunar orbit?
"Ayn Rand is a bloody socialist compared to me." - Robert A. Heinlein
China on top of the USA economically? The amount of poverty in urban and rural areas in China is astounding. And with the looming recession and intake of chinese exports already drying up I highly doubt their economy will look like anything other than "developing nation" status for a long time.
You only read about the rich in china and the communist govt's facade of "how good things have become" to the rest of the world.
Did you watch too much of the farce of an olympics this year to think that everything is fine and dandy in China? Probably. Wake up.
Aside from the troll, he has sort of a point. India has massive inequality problems, is still haunted by the caste system (perhaps the only advantage of Mao was he got rid of equivalent crap from China, at quite steep a cost).
Its possible space technology will filter down and help the poorest people, but somehow I doubt it.
Already has: Education, communication, irrigation, weather forecasting, telemedicine etc.
In a country like India, where over 60% of the economy is agricultural, and most of that is without man-made irrigation, satellites are essential.
to quote the founder of ISRO, sarabhai, (and, er, disregard the whole 'moon' bit :)):
"There are some who question the relevance of space activities in a developing nation. To us, there is no ambiguity of purpose. We do not have the fantasy of competing with the economically advanced nations in the exploration of the moon or the planets or manned space-flight. But we are convinced that if we are to play a meaningful role nationally, and in the community of nations, we must be second to none in the application of advanced technologies to the real problems of man and society."
It's good to know that although the US has surrendered the leadership role, progress will go on.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
In the next decade or so, India and China are going to figure out they can do business with each other _than_ sucking up to Uncle Sam. Uncle Sam though would want to ensure this never happens [read up ASEAN].
Discount 2 billion people trading with each other at your own peril.
Great, so now if anyone can get a picture of the US landing site we can put that whole conspiracy theory to rest.
on this page do not know what pride is.
I dont get the frequent reference to India's poverty in this context. This mission did not dent India's poverty statistics for better or worse. So get over it really!
Awesome AWESOME AWESOME!!!
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
Quit being an idiot. He didn't express hatred for them. Indeed, to even consider the alleged fact significant, he must have some empathy for them.
India has massive inequality problems, is still haunted by the caste system
You must be referring to K.R.Narayanan, President of India 1997-2002. He was born a Dalit, one of the lowest castes possible.
I'm not trying to deny the existence of castism in India. It is still present in some of the rural areas, but it is on the wane.
There's a lot to be learned from these third world countries.. one word - Efficiency.
Real men read Slashdot articles at -1, bottom up.
Govt must notify every Caste as a separate Religion.
Does anybody here have other innovative ideas to prevent Casteism and Religious Conversions in India
Slashdot = Sarcasm
After traveling to India, I think racism is far more prevalent in the US than castism in India. There are far few temples(I've heard of one in several villages I visited) where people of all castes cant go. But most of the churches here, is superbly "color" segregated. I think we should not mud sling when there is so much to do on our side.
One of the primary objectives of Chandrayan 1 mission is to map the lunar surface for helium 3.
The world oil productions has reached half way point ( still debated though) and growing countries like India and China are being foresighted in their quest for sources for energy. I believe if helium 3 is found on the moon even a single lunar mission could supply the worlds requirement for many many years to come.
Nitin Joseph
Actually, casteism and regionalism are rife in India's society. It is all just kept under a light veil. I remember reading a study which showed a statistical disadvantage against people who had lower caste names when applying for a post in a private sector company. Class differences are also obvious. I'm fairer skinned than other people here, and I can tell you that it is obvious to me that I am being treated with more 'respect'.
That's a false dichotomy. India can feed all its people and do space missions. It doesn't.
I used to think the same as you, but the INSAT series was very beneficial to India, including the rural population. While a moon mission may not make as much sense, I think it is worthwhile because it gives the ISRO experience. And that is useful because the ISRO makes quite a bit of money from launching commercial satellites.
Prevent religious conversions? Our constitution expressly guarantees the right to people to practice whatever religion they want, irrespective of whether or not they were born into it. That's what Freedom of Religion means.
If you're using the World Bank statistics, that is because of the weird way they measure the poverty line. I think that is not a good idea. Other people have made the point better than I can
who modded this troll? lighten up, it's a joke!
Mod parent +1 funny
umm.. The Indian space program not only pays for itself, it is profitable (i.e. it returns money back to the Government). I think gross margins are 100%. Not too shabby. http://www.ndtv.com/convergence/ndtv/moonmission/Story.aspx?ID=NEWEN20080068200&type=SpecialReport
Its never all rosy, is it? Look at the conservatism and racism in the rural areas of the US - they still havent gotten out of it - its the same for the rural areas in India. If you go to the cities, nobody cares about caste, etc. - its all the villages.
I agree with you here. In fact, a 6 instruments on Chandrayaan are non-Indian. They must have got paid for that too.
Well, in this particular case, they carried the instruments free of cost. But the success of the mission can mean that more companies are willing to entrust launching their satellites to the ISRO.
What makes the Chandrayaan mission interesting is the cost - USD 87 million which is about the same as the price of a Boeing 737-900ER.
http://www.boeing.com/commercial/prices/index.html
If USD 87 million is all it takes to send a mission to the moon, it signifies much lower costs for putting up satellites around the earth.
If India's standard of living goes up dramatically enough in a decade that their purchasing power per person rivals the US, I'll eat my soggy underpants.
Recall that if the average American can pay $1 for something but the average Indian can only afford $.1, the goods will all be shipped to the US (provided that the shipping cost disparity between China-US and China-India < $.9.
Freedom of Religion works in theory. .
However religious conversion in India is taboo.
I'd like to buy homeland for our 10 million people. http://twitter.com/mahadiga
Castes are a form of socio-economic collusion in India since 12th century. Hinduism's caste system is a religious-based system of separating groups and keeping one class (the Brahmins) over everyone else.
In America there is no system in place today that forces people to remain separate or keeps one class subservient to another. If you were born the son of a street sweeper, but excelled, you could become a doctor or lawyer or some celebrity or entrepreneur - and at the same time you would be fully accepted by your peers.
Not so in India. The caste system freezes everyone in place. It is extremely difficult - almost impossible - for someone from the lowest caste to rise in education and social status.
A Dalit would never be allowed to marry into one of the higher castes and would never be accepted as an equal. And for a Dalit to make it into medical school or become a member of high society in India is very rare indeed. Only by escaping from the grasp of Hinduism do they have much of a chance....
And only 1% of marriages in India are Inter-Caste or Inter-Religious.
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