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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."
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.
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?
Is Sweeden third world too with all their socialism?
of course not, socialism puts the "wee!!!" in Sweeden
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.
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?
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."
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!
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)
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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
it has nothing to do with being too proud. a large portion of the homeless population in the U.S. are mentally ill. we just aren't willing to fund the social programs and mental health infrastructure to take care of these people, so they end up in the streets. and not all cities with a homeless population have shelters. in my area there are neither homeless shelters nor facilities for the mentally disabled. this has been known for quite some time but little has been done about it.
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.
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.
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.
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