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."

Comments

Fascinating photos

[CruddyBuddy]

Fascinating photos. We don't often get views of the Earth from this altitude, stuck as we are in low earth orbit (ISS - looking at you).

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.

Re:Awesome!

[jools33]

It would be really cool if they could send back a nice high res picture of one of the old Apollo missions - just to kill of the conspiracy theories once and for all. Although the theorists would no doubt immediately claim them as fakes...

Hope in other nations

[SharpFang]

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)

Re:Does it too smell of curry?

[powerslave12r]

There's a lot to be learned from these third world countries.. one word - Efficiency.