India has become the first country to successfully land a spacecraft near the south pole of the moon.

  • TWeaK@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    37
    ·
    1 year ago

    Amazing stuff. After Japan’s failed landing recently, it’s nice to see a success story.

      • TWeaK@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        28
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        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.

  • Skua@kbin.social
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    37
    ·
    1 year ago

    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