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India's Chandrayaan Lands Impact Probe On the Moon
yaksha writes to tell us that the Indian Space probe, Chandrayaan, has become only the fourth nation to land a probe on the Moon. The 35-kg Moon Impact Probe touched down in what officials are describing as a "perfect operation." "Developed by ISRO's Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre of Thiruvananthapuram, the primary objective of MIP is to demonstrate the technologies required for landing a probe at the desired location on the moon. The probe will help qualify some of the technologies related to future soft landing missions. This apart, scientific exploration of the moon at close distance is also intended using MIP."
I don't know if "landing" is the right term for it, exactly. That doesn't seem fair to people and devices that actually... don't splat when they "land."
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
the Indian Space probe, Chandrayaan has become only the fourth nation to land a probe on the Moon
It also must be the smallest nation to ever accomplish such a feat!
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
Is it a lander or did it impact?
When I book a flight, I want to know the landing time, not the impact time.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Wonderful day. Proud to be an Indian.
Yes, if there's another successful nation on the planet, we're dooooooomed.
Talk about insecure.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
You know, I'm going to tell you something. It may seem like the sensible option would be to take the space money and put it elsewhere, but that isn't true.
India's INSAT series have been very helpful in the past, and people were saying this when those were launched. ISRO has a nice commercial launch program and this will only improve perceptions of their ability and reliability.
That's all without pointing out the implicit false dichotomy in your comment. India can solve its problems, we, as a people, in incredible short sightedness, have chosen not to. Corruption is rampant, but the only people who can stand strong against it (the informed, educated middle class) is happy because they have good salaries. The poor cannot do anything, they have little power. The rich won't do anything, they benefit. We're in that lovely no-man's land where it is better for the individual to take what he's got and live it nicely. I don't mean this as a condemnation of any political philosophy, or India itself. I am Indian, and I am like this, and I can see that everyone else is, too.
Here are the first images from MIP.. Image 1 Image 2
Unfortunately, you're not the only one. A lot of people are deluded in precisely the same way. There's a old human instinct that gets misapplied in modern times such that when someone in Florida is successful, someone in Michigan gets excited about it, proud of the accomplishment and hopeful for his future prospects in the world, whereas if it's someone in Berlin or Baghdad or Beijing, the same person in Michigan gets depressed, takes no pride in it, and worries about his future prospects in the world. This never made a great deal of sense, and makes virtually none at all in the modern world with a global economy.
We enrich ourselves the most (both monetarily and culturally) through our interactions with those more closely on par with us economically. Our best trading partners are the G8, and we all profit immensely from their success. Our most harmful relationships, both for our own economies and citizens as well as for those we exploit, are with third-world nations. The imbalances in those relationships hurt us all in different ways.
The moral of this story is quite simple: the sooner India, China, and other third-world nations "get their acts together" and rise to "first-world" status, the sooner they come to be on par with us in the same way our G8 partners are, the richer we all will be. An impoverished and thus cheaply exploitable India is a far greater threat to us than opportunity -- a rich and prosperous India would be a far greater opportunity than threat.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
If they land men on the moon in two years, they'll be 41 years behind. You seem to assume we haven't accomplished anything since 1969. You're discounting our Mars missions (rovers, landers, satellites), the Hubble, the Space Station, GPS, the Shuttle, the upcoming JWST, not to mention the myriad satellites, probes and impacters. We've truly, repeatedly, gone where no man has gone before, they cannot say the same. It's much easier to follow in the footsteps of another than to blaze your own trail.
Granted, we haven't really made any giant leaps since 69, except for ubiquitous Internet (that's a massive except) and minicomputers, but we have made enough small steps to climb a mountain. Everything we did yesterday, we do better today. We haven't done too much new, just everything old, better. So much advancement has been made in the last 15 years, it's ridiculous. It may not be a space age, but it's certainly the age of improvement and refinement. Everything is smaller, faster, smarter, cheaper, and all around better. Many small steps, in aggregate, can be better than one giant leap.
It's foolish to assume that because people are catching up to our achievements made decades ago, that they are somehow superior to us. It is good for them though, and perhaps it will give us the impetus to move on to bigger and better things.
You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer. - Winston Churchill
We can only hope that their prosperity also brings them a feeling of superiority and entitlement as well as a strong desire to spend the weekend watching sports from their couches. That should slow down their ascendency a bit.
Now we see the violence inherent in the system.