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India has become the first country to successfully land a spacecraft near the south pole of the moon.
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Amazing stuff. After Japan’s failed landing recently, it’s nice to see a success story.
Japan tried too? I only saw the Russian one.
The Japanese lander crashed in April this year, it got confused about its altitude due to passing over craters and thought it was on the ground when it was still a couple hundred meters up (edit: lol, about 50 hundred, ie 5km), then fell down and crashed.
India last tried in 2019, but that also failed to land, iirc that was (partly?) due to some thrust asymmetry.
Russia didn’t even establish their proper lunar orbit and crashed the whole thing straight into the moon.
Scott Manley has videos covering the details of these, eg Japan’s. I’m sure he’ll have videos about today’s landing soon enough.
Edit2: Scott Manley’s video for India’s Chandrayaan 2 failure in 2019. I don’t think much information has come out about Russia’s recent failure yet.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=2JlUnOAiMm4
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
“Japan” didn’t try, a private company in Japan did.
Congratulations India! I had never considered that the moon’s poles would be good for solar energy. My brain was stuck in the thinking of Earth’s poles, but of course the moon doesn’t have an atmosphere to get in the way of the light and make the poles colder and darker
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The Chandrayaan-3, which means “mooncraft” in Sanskrit, put down its Vikram lander shortly after 6pm (1230 GMT) near the little-explored lunar south pole in a world first for any space programme.
People across the country were glued to television screens and said prayers as the spacecraft approached the surface.
The country’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, watched the landing from South Africa, where he is attending the Brics summit.
Instead, the probe orbited Earth several times to gain speed before embarking on its month-long lunar trajectory.
A six-wheeled rover is scheduled to roam the lunar surface gathering images and data.
The Chandrayaan-3 is expected to remain functional for two weeks, running a series of experiments including a spectrometer analysis of the mineral composition of the lunar surface.
The original article contains 320 words, the summary contains 126 words. Saved 61%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Congratulations, India. Nice to see the uncommanded lithobraking maneuver has been fixed.
A huge congratulations to India.
Nice. I was starting to think the moon’s south pole had become the new Bermuda Triangle.
You go from zero to Bermuda Triangle quite quickly.
Draw me a triangle and lose a vessel in it, and I’ll have my knee length slacks on like that 🫰
