India’s Vikram Suffered “Hard Landing” on Moon
ISRO’s Chandrayaan-2’s orbiter has spotted the Vikram lander in the surface of the moon, but it’s not looking very good.
“Yes, we have located the lander on the lunar surface. It must have been a hard landing,” Sivan told PTI….
Asked if the lander was “damaged” during the “hard landing”, Sivan said: “That we do not know.”
Sivan had said on Saturday that the space agency would try to establish link with the lander for 14 days and reiterated on Sunday after it was located on the lunar surface by Chandrayaan-2’s on-board cameras that those efforts would continue.
Fourteen days is the length of a lunar day. The lander and the Pragyan rover it carried are not designed to survive the frigid cold of the lunar night.
The Vikram lander stopped communicating with ground controllers as it descended toward a landing near the moon’s south pole. ISRO said the loss of communications occurred less than 2 km (1.25 miles) above the surface.
Chandrayaan-2 is India’s second mission to the moon and first attempt to land a payload on the surface.
8 responses to “India’s Vikram Suffered “Hard Landing” on Moon”
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I watched the stream live. At about 2 km above the surface, the lander went into a spin. So I’m going to go out on a limb and say that “hard landing” is a euphemism for crashed into the moon hard and scattered pieces far and wide.
Now, I am impressed that the lander got as far, and as close, as it did. I have no doubt that India will figure out what went wrong and will try again. Heck, if you look at NASA’s history of soft landing lunar probes, it’s not at all stellar. Eventually they were successful, but it took many failures to get to that first (uncrewed) soft landing.
Maybe. The camera has a .3m resolution. It would show what shape it was in.They just will not say. Of course it landed on auto pilot. It may have landed fine and just lost com. with Earth. If the spin was horizontal, it would break off its legs. 6 instruments in the orbiter. 7 years. Should get a lot from those.
Another term would be ‘augered in’. It remains to be seen if Isro will publish any photos of the site from the HD camera on board the orbiter.
Expect detail pictures after the NASA LRO orbiter passes overhead of the impact/landing site.
True, especially if you have the wisdom to ask those that have done it before for advice. No reason to reinvent the wheel or remake old mistakes.
ITAR
ITAR just prohibits the sharing of certain technologies. It doesn’t mean that Indian scientists can’t talk to American scientists and that Americans can’t talk to Russians. I’m sure there is some U.S. tech that can’t be shared but that doesn’t mean that all communication is cut off.
The USA really has no failed lunar landing attempts OTHER then two inside the very successful Surveyor program. and at least 1 of the failures had nothing to do with the landing effort, it was a QC issue with one of the thrusters and the thing got into an unrecoverable spin. the other one ? who knows probably the solid fuel engine exploded but its not clear…neither wreckage or a landed vehicle have been found.
the chaos of lunar landing efforts was the Ranger “crash land” programs…Rangers 3=5 were rather total failures (they had as a component an attempt to “hard land’ a capsule on the moon, but that system never had a chance to work) of the main bus…for various reasons but most likely the diodes that were used in the power supply
Of course all the crewed lunar landings were successful.
in theory landing on the moon with rockets should be well understood…however no one that I know of is using the quite elegant and comparatively simply “system” that Surveyor used…