India has a space program since 70s. It has a sent moon missions thrice now, one mars mission and has an upcoming sun probe too. It has a polar orbit launch vehicle which has one of the safest record in the world. Cost wise, it is pretty effective for satellite launched

fantastic to see India space program. More countries in space, the better

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=DLA_64yz8Ss">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=DLA_64yz8Ss</a>

&gt; The Moon has been on a role eating landers and space probes lately.The complexity of landing on the moon is somewhere between that of launching a spacecraft and that of a self-driving car. It&#x27;s sad that so many landers were lost - it would have been heartbreaking for those who built them. But I hope that they attempt it again and perfect this complex task.

Looking forward to this. The Moon has been on a role eating landers and space probes lately.

It&#x27;s a dual-language telecast. The commentators alternate between Hindi and English, keep watching.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=DLA_64yz8Ss">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=DLA_64yz8Ss</a>This is in English

Seems like it&#x27;s in Hindi. Any links for the anglophones?

I think they switch between english and hindi every 5 minutes or so.

Streaming YouTube link <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;live&#x2F;DLA_64yz8Ss">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;live&#x2F;DLA_64yz8Ss</a>

but seriously why would they not? If they have something nice to show of why not? This is publicly paid project (by indian tax payers) that is political in its nature. Why not show as much as possible?

Why won&#x27;t the people landing on the moon cater to me?

Yes. For solar panel purposes they&#x27;re landing in the lunar day (14 Earth days?).Edit: At the start of a lunar day, which equals 28 Earth days. (Source: BBC <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;live&#x2F;world-asia-india-66576580" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;live&#x2F;world-asia-india-66576580</a> )

It&#x27;s simulation for sure. Would there be sunlight to view it live?

There&#x27;s no footage from the last one as the lander crash-landed on the surface of the moon.NASA reported locating the Vikram Lander&#x27;s debris in Dec 2019:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nasa.gov&#x2F;image-feature&#x2F;goddard&#x2F;2019&#x2F;vikram-lander-found" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nasa.gov&#x2F;image-feature&#x2F;goddard&#x2F;2019&#x2F;vikram-lande...</a>

Thats not accurate, there is &quot;footage&quot; of other spacecraft, such as the first soviet venus lander or so

Definitely no footage, at most maybe a picture if it lands successfully.The only footage we have of any spacecraft landing anywhere other than Earth is either from Apollo or the Perseverance skycrane deployment. If they do have footage, it&#x27;ll be like the latter, retrieved after the fact.

This one has onboard cameras and there are curated videos from other phases of flight at the OP link.

It was mentioned they were receiving footage continuously. I think when all monitors are shown, in the middle you can discern pictures being rendered.Edit: They called this out now, it seems those are live pictures.

Though it&#x27;s disappointing to see simulation, it makes sense as there is no external vehicle to capture the live video and stream it. The lander cameras are showing realistic video though.In principle, it should be clearly stated which is real and which is sim.

can the frames received be stitched into an animation video using some kind of image interpolation algorithm?

The lander external view is simulation, but they have a camera  (Lander Imager Display) looking downwards that is transmitting live photos every couple of seconds (center, top right on the main screen).

Does anybody know if we will be watching a simulation or actual footage?I am asking because the livestream of the last failed moonlanding this year didn&#x27;t feature a single second of footage. None.

In general software development it&#x27;s usually not a problem if your program crashes, then you can fix the bug and run it again. If the thing that crashes is a lunar lander however, you should put a bit more effort into covering all the eventualities...

I really ought to dig up a reference for this, but there are strong echoes from the past here. Margaret Hamilton (who coined the term &#x27;software engineering&#x27; and can be seen standing next to a tall pile of green bar printouts of the Apollo software) brought her daughter to work one weekend during the Apollo program and she (daughter) fiddled with the buttons and caused an error condition. Hamilton, based on this, argued that the software should account for the possibility of mistakes. Management&#x27;s view was that the highly-trained astronauts wouldn&#x27;t make mistakes. In time, Hamilton prevailed, and was proven correct.

The recent japanese lander had something like this happen a while back. The altitude radar noticed a sudden 2km drop in ground-level, and the system assumed it was broken and stopped using that data.Turns out it just flew over a cliff edge that actually does that. Completely by accident.

While I worked at Google I once searched for &quot;&#x2F;&#x2F;this should never happen&quot; in the code base.It was in there.A lot.

This applies to general software development but is especially true in this caseWhile we think &quot;this cannot ever happen&quot; in a lot of cases it can, in ways you did not consider. Both for good and bad

It probably wasn’t even the error. It could have been an accumulation of error % on some unbounded input.

&gt; seems like such a gross omission.Almost all space mission code only ever has the so-called &#x27;happy path&#x27;. We rely on extremely tight mechanical and aerospace engineering tolerances to achieve that happy path.The Hubble Space Telescope&#x27;s primary mirror grinding was off by a matter of micrometres, and resulted in blurry images.Consider all the Mars rovers. Imagine some wind gust threw the descending module off course, or a retro-rocket failed because of vibrations.Writing code for space missions isn&#x27;t like writing a CRUD app. Developers can&#x27;t just teleport to a space probe millions to billions of kilometres away to rectify errors and debug running code on the fly.For the record, the &#x27;failure path&#x27; for Apollo 11 was to get the US President to announce to the world that the two astronauts would likely be marooned on the Moon. Apollo 13 very nearly failed, too.

That&#x27;s probably why they haven&#x27;t officially straight-up announced the issue.This wouldn&#x27;t be the first time that a mission failed due to embarrassing failures in basic software practices (eg Starliner&#x27;s initial software bugs emerging from a lack of integrated testing).Main difference is that you aren&#x27;t triggering a billion overly sensitive nationalistic folks when you point out similar embarrassing errors in most other countries&#x27; programs. Eg the time NASA lost a probe due to miscommunicated units, the Apollo 1 disaster, the space shuttle disasters, or the tape around the wiring in Starliner, which was intended to be fire retardant actually turning out to be flammable...Hell, Japan&#x27;s Hakuto-R also failed because the software&#x27;s error detection was buggy, and they openly admitted as much without any bluster about how no one but other people with experience writing code for space probes can criticize them.

Writing code for something that flies into space is not nearly as easy as you think it is. Perhaps the next time you write a comment you could first develop the software which you&#x27;re complaining about first. I&#x27;m sure it would be a trivial task for someone of your stature :)

Out of curiosity, how many space programs have you been involved with?

No that’s a bit unfair. ISRO, Israel, and Japan all had reasons for their failures that were mainly technical

This is the software engineering version of &quot;I am very badass&quot;, passing judgement on software at the cutting edge of science, while sitting at home writing React code.

You are saying &quot;gross omission&quot; like this is some Python script, like they are skipping the else clause for a condition. Imagine trying to land a plane that is flying at Mach 2, with no direct control, only a video feed with 4 seconds resolution, a bunch of sensors and a tank of fuel for retrograde burn to slow you down. Can you even fathom the number of scenarios that can happen. Your application may have 1 happy path and 2 sad path. Here you get only 1 happy path, a few not so happy path where your probe land sideway or just roll down a crater; and the rest of them are every other combinations of your probe&#x27;s orientation and speed vector and collision location.Hell, you can run a few thousand simulators for every scenario you can think of during descent, including lost of burner, propellant leak, etc, and then during the actual descent a chip get burnt because of a stray cosmic ray. There will still be somebody on HN call you out for cutting corner.

Not considering such a basic error condition seems like a gross omission.This can&#x27;t even come from the software engineering, but must be some kind of managerial failure (e.g. we&#x27;re short on time, but have to report great progress to my boss, so skip this scenario).

That is just a testament to the incredible work of the Squad team. The Indian landing is not similar to Kerbal, rather, Kerbal is very very similar to the real experience. Amazing.

Incredibly Kerbal vibe. I think something like that happened to me when using MechJeb. (it even has a &quot;land whenever&quot; feature, which it was too late to use at that point)

So in Scott&#x27;s words, a &quot;fly safe&quot; subroutine?

Yes, it was a very conservative landing trajectory. But it is very, very difficult to get a hoverslam right the first time, or the second, or the third...I did like seeing the live images captured during descent, I also hope those get made into a video and posted online.Looking forward to the rover deployment too.

If they have the fuel available, may as well be very conservative. Either burn the fuel on descent or have it sit in the tank forever on the lunar surface.

Possibly the lander had a choice to be more careful&#x2F;picky if the remaining fuel permitted. (Just as Armstrong did.)

If anything they seem to have overcorrected for this.  This landing path stopped with a near hover at around 800m, then a prolonged hover at 150m while the lander scoped the situation, then an extremely slow descent that allowed for corrections the whole way down.  Very impressive.

They also had an issue with the thrust gradient it could only do it increments in 20% which was too much of a change this one was finer which allowed for better control authority.

Link to the Scott Manley video - The Real Reason Why Chandrayaan 2 Crashed on the Moon: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=2ngVl6iO94c">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=2ngVl6iO94c</a>

Could you elaborate how that applies here? Communication is out of the question - there&#x27;s nothing the people on the ground can correct. And the lander apparently failed because it tried to navigate its way back to the designated landing site.

That&#x27;s an example of failing to follow the &quot;Aviate, Navigate, Communicate&quot; rule of thumb.

Yes, this seems to be one of the issues. Here is a talk by ISRO Chairman S Somanath at Indian Institute of Science (IISc) about the same and what they added. He goes into details of what went wrong. These are based on my limited understanding. One of the thrusters had an issue and got activated for longer (or may be activation profile of thrusters at its extreme&#x27;s were different from modeled). They had a narrow landing region selected as final position (even one possible point). So now their control system tried to correct this but the algorithm had a bug and that caused it to be further delayed. At this point the correction required, i.e; thrusters to be activated, was outside the tolerance levels. So finally ended up with 50m&#x2F;s vertical speed. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=fZ2sNRP1opY&amp;t=1440s">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=fZ2sNRP1opY&amp;t=1440s</a>With new one, they did couple of things. Larger area to be selected for landing based on camera input. Escape sequence to more achievable points, if something like this happens again. They increased the tolerance from 10 degrees to 25 degrees and guessing fixed the bug in code. They also did some smoothening of the trajectory for different phases to make it more continuous. I think they also made other changes in engines among other things and a whole host of testing.

They have to, don&#x27;t they? There&#x27;s no other way.

Also did they use image processing to guide the landing this time? American and Chinese probes seems to use it to do the final phase of soft landing.

Scott Manly has a video on why he thinks the last one failed. It sounds like their landing software didn&#x27;t have &quot;oh crap, we&#x27;re way off course, just land wherever&quot;. It only had the happy path of &quot;fly to here and land&quot;, so when it switched to the landing phase it tried valiently (including flying upside down) to try to fly back to the landing zone, but the landing zone was much further than fuel supplies allowed.Hopefully they have upgraded software to just gracefully attempt a landing, and hopefully they won&#x27;t be off course.

The woman answered my question — 18 minutes until powered descent begins.

They started streaming ... how many minutes now until the landing is expected?

5,8 million now. I have never seen _any_ live video with that many views.

4.1 million watching live on youtube. Wow!

A nation isn&#x27;t a singular-minded entity; rather, it comprises diverse citizens who assume various roles and contribute uniquely to global improvement. Just because they&#x27;ve successfully landed a rover on the moon doesn&#x27;t imply the abandonment of all efforts to alleviate poverty.Honestly, why does the recognition of India&#x27;s positive accomplishments always seem overshadowed by the specter of poverty and other challenges? Did the Americans eradicate every societal issue before embarking on their lunar mission? Indians should be proud — this accomplishment is truly remarkable and signifies positive societal strides toward a better collective future. Such achievements ignite hope, and progress is fundamentally built upon hope, regardless of the symbolic origins it might stem from.

An alternative perspective to consider, what happens to all the skilled engineers interested in and capable of working on advanced technologies like those intended for space if a country decides to put all other development on hold to singlemindedly focus on eradicating poverty?What would happen to the next generations of talented potential engineers? What value would there be to pursuing an advanced education? Since obviously a space program isn&#x27;t the only &quot;luxury&quot; that should be put on hold if poverty exists!The talent would all leave and the next generations would be less incentivized to pursue the very kinds of careers that help a country develop.

Look at the US military budget<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cdn.cfr.org&#x2F;sites&#x2F;default&#x2F;files&#x2F;image&#x2F;2020&#x2F;12&#x2F;002_military_spending_percent_of_world.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cdn.cfr.org&#x2F;sites&#x2F;default&#x2F;files&#x2F;image&#x2F;2020&#x2F;12&#x2F;002_mi...</a>versus education<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i0.wp.com&#x2F;cef.org&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;slide2-1.jpg" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i0.wp.com&#x2F;cef.org&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;slide2-1.jpg</a>As a human I think you should arrest Elon Musk immediately for misleading advertising and fraudulent claims.As a human I think the US should open its borders for immigrants from Asia.As a human I think the US should scrap the petrodollar and licence as much nuclear tech as possible.

This may not be a popular question, but given the amount of poverty in India, is a space program really the best expenditure?As a geek, I love the space program.As a human, I don&#x27;t think it makes sense given the poverty.

* bottoms of craters on the South Pole.Some places there get eternal sunlight instead: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Peak_of_eternal_light" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Peak_of_eternal_light</a>

Two points I&#x27;m aware of:1. No one has managed to make a landing on the moon&#x27;s South Pole yet.2. Since the South Pole doesn&#x27;t get any sunlight at all, it&#x27;s believed that there&#x27;s a possibility of discovering ice&#x2F;water there.

This is the first time India soft-landed anything outside of Earth. That by itself is a big deal. Soft-landing guidance on a body without atmosphere is much more complex than launch guidance.

&gt; With this mission, India became the first to impact the Lunar south pole and the 7th nation to reach the lunar surface.Wiki article for Chandrayaan-1 from 2008.

It&#x27;s a big deal because India has never landed on the moon before; only three nations have.

Mission to unexplored south pole of the moon and investigating the presence of surface water at the bottom of craters that don&#x27;t receive sunlight.Simultaneously capability development and demonstration for ISRO

And the BRICS summit is going on right now... What a powerful display of softpower.

Agree.The quicker russians will get rid of putin infestation the sooner this disgrace will end.

Russian space program is a shadow of what it once was. Their history is full of daring missions and extraordinary achievements. I wish they would engage in a space race than in a war.

Speaking of that, was that another failure of a modified Fregat or am I just too dumb to speak on this topic?

Besides what others said, it gets extra spice from the fact Russia failed to do the same just days ago.

- Only 3 other countries have landed on the moon- Its landing on the south pole where nobody&#x27;s ever landed before- Russia failed to land on the moon a week or two back

They&#x27;ve made a controlled landing on the moon. Just because it&#x27;s been done a few times before, ever, doesn&#x27;t make this a small accomplishment.

This is a big deal because since 1976, only China has (edit: had!) managed to land something successfully on the Moon. And also space exploration is cool in general.

why 1976 is a starting point? Why not counting successful Lunokhod rover missions? Looks like you&#x27;re trying to to fit facts to narrative.

Actually 3 by India.1- was an orbiter: Success2- Orbiter+ lander&amp;rover: Partial success, orbiter succeed but lander crashed.3- Lander&amp;rover: Succesful.

A look at the previous lunar missions [1] should give an idea. There have been 7 lander missions since 1976 (not including impactors):- 3 by China: All success- 1 by Japan (along with a rover from UAE): Failed- 1 by Israel: Failed- 1 by Russia: Failed- 2 by India: Previous one failed. This one succeededI can see why the entire world would be excited by something like this. I hope that there will be routine landings by different players and that the landing guidance would be perfected.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_missions_to_the_Moon#Missions_by_date" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_missions_to_the_Moon#M...</a>

Technically no one has landed in the crater ridden South pole on the dark side of the moon. Scientifically it&#x27;s useful to course these uncharted parts of the moon both for water&#x2F;ice and mineral composition.I don&#x27;t see how poverty comes into play here: every nation had similar issues when they were doing space exploration. They are two unrelated spheres. Solving one doesn&#x27;t mean the other won&#x27;t be

The budget with which this mission was accomplished is something.Less than a typical hollywood movie budget.

The money used on these programmes doesn&#x27;t burn up, it gets recirculated. As an Indian I consider this a pretty good use of tax payer money.

A lot of poor people were genuinely happy and inspired today.

Sorry to say but no contrarian thought in your comment.

What typical engineering course covers the design of reliable systems which work mostly autonomously in environments with huge temperature variations, vacuum, inaccessibility for repair, significant radiation, mass constraints, sensor limitations etc?Designing stuff for space involves a lot of challenges that typical engineering does not.Plus, while the US and USSR may have done the necessary technical work, India doesn&#x27;t get most of that knowledge and thus has to learn the lessons itself.

I&#x27;d be curious if it&#x27;s at all interesting from a technical perspective. It was impressive in the 60s and 70s because a lot of new things needed to be discovered and understood to make it happen. But now a days.. are there really technical aspects that would not be covered in a typical engineering course?I get it&#x27;s very expensive and hence difficult to pull off - but this makes it comes off as mostly nationalism and a big display of disposable income (which for a country with so much poverty is .. something)

We get to see more images of the Moon&#x27;s surface. In a previously unexplored region.How is that not a big deal?

Not asking rhetorically but why is this a big deal? Is it because it&#x27;s going to the south pole? What are some other benefits to be gained from this?

They are showing it sometimes, with a camera pointed at that screen - the one to the left of the big numbers with velocities.  There&#x27;s also a simulated view that shows the surface (the second big screen from the left).

Am I mistaken or do they have an onboard view in the command center, but are not showing us?

GHY is probably <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goonhilly.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goonhilly.org&#x2F;</a>So, likely the current time at the location of the radio antennas they&#x27;re using to communicate with the lander.

Fwiw the esa time is the same as Amsterdam Time (cest, get +2)

If the other 2 are NASA and ESA the other BIK is probably a Russian one.

I&#x27;m not very familiar with this source [0], but it states &quot;ESA was providing support to the Chandrayaan-3 mission from three of its ground stations located in Kourou (French Guiana), Goonhilly (United Kingdom), and New Norcia (Western Australia).&quot; Although BIK doesn&#x27;t obviously map to any of those.[0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.moneycontrol.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;india&#x2F;chandrayaan-3-european-space-agency-tracking-lander-module-from-three-ground-stations-says-official-11245491.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.moneycontrol.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;india&#x2F;chandrayaan-3-europea...</a>.

It&#x27;s a station from DLR in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dlr.de&#x2F;eoc&#x2F;en&#x2F;desktopdefault.aspx&#x2F;tabid-5287&#x2F;10253_read-21996&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dlr.de&#x2F;eoc&#x2F;en&#x2F;desktopdefault.aspx&#x2F;tabid-5287&#x2F;102...</a>

Goonhilly, Hawaii, but I can&#x27;t figure out BIK. They&#x27;re NASA and ESA tracking stations: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eoportal.org&#x2F;other-space-activities&#x2F;estrack" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eoportal.org&#x2F;other-space-activities&#x2F;estrack</a>, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.indiatoday.in&#x2F;science&#x2F;chandrayaan-3&#x2F;story&#x2F;how-isro-nasa-esa-tracking-chandrayaan-3-spacecraft-moon-landing-2425025-2023-08-23" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.indiatoday.in&#x2F;science&#x2F;chandrayaan-3&#x2F;story&#x2F;how-is...</a>

One of the clocks is labeled &quot;IST,&quot; which I assume means India Standard Time.Another clocks are labeled &quot;GHY,&quot; &quot;HAW,&quot; and &quot;BIK.&quot; What do they indicate?

Currently in a live server with others watching and it&#x27;s a lot of fun. I happen to know many people working in the space industry, and a lot of great engineers come from India. Very happy and excited for India and its people. Goodluck!edit: lets goo!!!

Just makes success that much sweeter. Well done India!

It’s brilliant! I think most Indians were really disappointed after the last failure, so it’s really reassuring that despite shooting further we were successful!

If you may: The peacock has landed! (Indian national bird)

I can see little kids waving flags and celebrating in my housing society! in 100s! Such a great feat and congratulations

You can see the onboard camera view in the background sometimes. And the only truly hard thing about this is getting the political will for the funding, so.

So many words about &quot;success&quot; - how about some goodies?!(To be clear, I am happy for India, just think it could be presented better)

&gt; Why such a long political speechISRO is primary arm of the Department of Space which is headed by the Prime Minister. So in essence, the Prime Minister is the boss. It is not an independent federal agency like NASA.

Unfortunately all the national space agencies seem to suffer from this. Both NASA and ESA also seem to think that people are tuning in to watch the smarmy politician talk rather than the robot making its way to space&#x2F;landing on another body.Had the same issue with JWST for example.

Because the whole endeavor was financed for its political impact.

They dont want us to see the little green UAPs that closely monitor what we are doing :-)

I absolutely agree that they should immediately release data &amp; images for more technically inclined section. However the reason for speeches is entire nation is watching this event across all age group, most of them don&#x27;t understand technical things, I would say even image of moon surface wont connect to most of them. Basically speeches is the way to connect &amp; artists impression images. To give some example, people thing entire rocket goes to moon, one of the politician was wishing &quot;passengers&quot; on the spacecraft, reputed news channel claiming &quot;breaking new&quot; that there wont be delay in landing as if we can push breaks like in car or traffic on the way. So you get the point, to connect to masses they are speaking in language that everyone understand

The whole Prime Minister thing was bizarre to me .. He was like on the mission-control screen with his own panel .. it was just weird lol.. Even in the US where our presidents fancy themselves god&#x27;s.. it still just had a weird perception from my point of view..But I&#x27;m proud of the people that worked on and executed that mission for them. Obviously a moment of immense national pride, well deserved.

Why such a long political speech and no views from onboard camera?

very good, congratulations on the achievement!

Congratulations to India! Every time I read of launches to space, I think (and sometimes say aloud) &quot;wow!&quot; It is awesome in the traditional sense of the world.

Now it needs to find the alien base hidden at the South Pole! All joking aside, great work by this team!

Also here come the British news lamenting about how India is wasting money instead of focusing on their poor. Slumdog Millionaire mentality.

One of the most populous countries has become a strong contender in space exploration. Hopefully, it will inspire so many more Indians to push it further and elevate the humanity, just like USA and USSR once did. It&#x27;s great.

It’s landed! Congratulations to India on this great achievement!

Why? No transparency at all. Show me the images and the video of the Moon.Every kid today can create an animation.

They showed the animation. Maybe in case something went wrong, they didn&#x27;t want to broadcast that?

No, the feed on the right switched to the animation from the lander&#x27;s view at 19m above the surface.

Maybe you were lagging? PM Modi&#x27;s face wasn&#x27;t displayed at the exact moment it landed, but it was shown before and after that moment.

&gt; The guy is a megalomanicThe Prime Minister is the head of Department of Space, whose primary arm is ISRO. He is the boss. Literally every Prime Minister of India has attended ISRO launches and addressed ISRO after success&#x2F;failure of launches.&gt; asked Modi to &quot;bless us&quot;You probably aren&#x27;t Indian but this is quite common in India where we seek blessings from elders.

The guy is a megalomanic. The ISRO official who announced the successful landing even asked Modi to &quot;bless us&quot;! No doubt a diktat from Modi.

Because: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=37235089">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=37235089</a>

The speech after had a weird order I was expecting ISRO to speak first, thought that was not needed but idk

Wait did it land while they were showing us Modi&#x27;s face? Why didn&#x27;t they show the camera feed?

Chandrayaan-3, Successfully Soft landed. Amazing feat by ISRO. Kudos to all engineers behind this.

It definitely crossed 8M, but not sure if it crossed the previous highest (Felix Baumgartner freefall) which is also around 8M.

I thought it was 8M earlier. I didn&#x27;t see this cross 6M though.

I mean, it&#x27;s video streaming, it&#x27;s not as easy as rocket science and orbital dynamics.

&gt; If I read correctly, this is now the most watched live video on YouTube!Which is disappointing. India should have their own video sharing&#x2F;livestream platform.

If I read correctly, this is now the most watched live video on YouTube! Congratulations to India and the team on this fantastic feat of an achievement.

Landed successfully at the Lunar south pole area.

His face was bigger than the landing feed!

Did the successful landing just crash Hacker News?

Congratulations to ISRO! Hopefully some interesting data and findings come from it and then Gaganyaan next!

&quot;the sky is not the limit&quot; if I heard correctly

Talk about perks given the absence of the post colonialism visa regime at the Moon, yeah?

&quot;India is now on the Moon&quot; PM Modi

Congratulations to all the engineers and technicians involved. Looking forward to some interesting findings by the rover.

This happens a lot to me in KSP, the lander tends to slide all the way to the bottom of the slope. Most of the time it&#x27;s okay, just need to tweak the dampeners on the landing legs a bit ;)EDIT: I went to re-watch the moment on youtube and it does seem like the lander moves slightly to the left!

Obviously I am not a golfer, but I would have waited until the onboard stabilized, sensors be damned.

That&#x27;s probably because the image data being larger than the on-board sensor data would take longer to reach earth, thus the latency.

I saw the onboard camera show movement after the celebrations started. Did anyone else see this?The onboard has not been shown since.

congrats ISRO and India for this great achievement.

30 minutes of happy faces but not a single broadcast image of the lander.

The Chandrayaan-2 mission had an orbiter, which is still operational, as well as the lander which crashed.

Chandrayaan 2 had 3 payloads. The lander crashed along with rover. But the orbiter is still functioning. It has 8 scientific instruments on board for various observations of lunar surface.

Can someone help me understand this Wikipedia article section: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Chandrayaan_programme#List_of_missions" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Chandrayaan_programme#List_of_...</a>Check the row for Chandrayaan-2. Why does it say Unsuccessful landing but main mission success and extended missing ongoing?What exactly are main mission and extended mission and how can they succeed or be ongoing when the landing has been unsuccessful?

Possible water which would be a giant resource for a permanent presence.

I believe Chandrayaan 1 has detected water, but not sure if it was the first one to do so

Chandrayaan 3 landed at around 69 degrees south latitude which isn&#x27;t far enough south to access the permanently shadowed craters where large ice deposits might occur (and the Pragyan rover uses solar panels for power).I haven&#x27;t read specific reasons for choosing that site, but we have never landed that far south, and it will be interesting to see what differences (if any) there are from the more central latitudes, which is a good enough reason on its own.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Lunar_south_pole" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Lunar_south_pole</a>&gt; It is of special interest to scientists because of the occurrence of water ice in permanently shadowed areas around it. The lunar south pole region features craters that are unique in that the near-constant sunlight does not reach their interior. Such craters are cold traps that contain a fossil record of hydrogen, water ice, and other volatiles dating from the early Solar System

The ice would also be pretty close to the Moon&#x27;s peaks of eternal light[1] where you don&#x27;t have to have your solar panels spend half of every month in darkness. So basically where you&#x27;d want to live on the Moon if you had to pick somewhere.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Peak_of_eternal_light" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Peak_of_eternal_light</a>

Moon undergoes extreme temperature fluctuations from day to night, resulting in boil off. There are spots on the South Pole that never see sunlight, so it’s our best bet for finding large deposits of water (as ice).

It&#x27;s 69° south, so it&#x27;s not so much the south pole as the polar region. For reference, the major landmass of Antarctica starts around that point on Earth. McMurdo Station is at around 78° South.

Firstly - congratulations to the whole team on this achievementI&#x27;m also curious- Why the south pole of the moon? does it have an added significance vs other locations on the moon?- Is a landing on the south pole more difficult to achieve? Seems so according to this article: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reuters.com&#x2F;science&#x2F;why-are-space-agencies-racing-moons-south-pole-2023-08-22&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reuters.com&#x2F;science&#x2F;why-are-space-agencies-racin...</a>

In science and exploration the only losers are the ones who don’t try to begin with.

Apologies for the OT, but it&#x27;s &quot;hear hear&quot;, not &quot;here here&quot; [0].[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Hear,_hear" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Hear,_hear</a>

&gt; It also ironic that a country and population seen as backwards by the British Empire have overtaken the British in landing on the moon.This is not the moment to go there, but still since we&#x27;re on the topic, current leaders of Britain (Prime Minister), Ireland (Taoiseach) and Scotland (First Minister) are all of Indian-Subcontinent origin. Britain and Ireland have leaders of Indian origin, while Scotland has of Pakistani origin.

There’s a novel Artemis by Andy Weir where Africa became the place to launch transports to the Moon. I’d happy for them if they managed to turn things around.

Just wait till BBC decides to throw a fit about it again

Note Britain is the third-largest contributor to the European Space Agency, and has a fairly large space industry (satellites, instruments etc).(The Beagle 2 lander which crashed into Mars in 2004 was managed from Britain.)

Here Here.It also ironic that a country and population seen as backwards by the British Empire have overtaken the British in landing on the moon.Would be nice to see the African and South American continent achieve a moon landing as well.

Congratulations India! And everyone.Actually congratulations to all countries still running space programmes including Russia&#x27;s failure.The more the merrier.This is a stupendously difficult thing to do, India is truly a superpower.

Interesting how close politicians are with anything related to the moon. Nixon on TV as much as the astronauts in 69, Modi on TV here. Both during massive consolidations of power towards the leaders who also have major corruption scandals.

That is exactly what happened last time during Chandrayaan 2. 
ISRO noticed and fixed the issue and launched Chandrayaan 3

I don&#x27;t know much about landing extraterrestrial missions, but I would imagine that the moment of touchdown is exactly the moment everyone in the control room should be keenly paying attention to their assignment instead of jumping up to celebrate (or at least try not to distract those that are). Because if that thing sunk into a pool of moon water or landed on top of another lunar lander, it would be 15 minutes before anyone realized. Just a minor layman observation.Anyhow congratulations to this team and to the people of this great nation.

They would have a loss of telemetry that screams of failure. I don&#x27;t see the possibility that they wouldn&#x27;t notice.

If the lander flipped over and exploded, it seems nobody would have noticed.

As an Indian, I feel elated to show one more feather in Indias cap, as an inspiration to my son.

Don&#x27;t think of Brain Drain as a lose lose situation. Lot of Indians who leave India contribute in many ways and in fact bring tons of knowledge and skills from the global world back to India (even if they don&#x27;t live there physically). Not to mention that amount of money that is exchanged by Non Resident Indians (also known as NRIs).It is good that Indians are able to go aboard and bring a globalized knowledge back to India.

It’s going to be very hard to brain drain a country of 1.4 billion people. That doesn’t even take into account the massive amount of money the diaspora sends back. The above is usually an argument people make when they don’t want to let immigrants into their country.

I wonder what else India could potentially achieve if they could retain their top talent.Congrats !

It went so cleanly it almost made an impression of being easy. Congrats!

The applause for the successful landing starts at 44:50 (take a few seconds&#x27; buffer).

Great achievement! Space is incredibly hard as they say. 
Hope ISRO continues with this momentum and achieves more success in its future missions!

They might take a quick shower first. It was a long journey.

That would be icing on the cake, but the real success was to get there. It&#x27;s a big step forward that&#x27;ll help humanity, not just India.

Landing on the Moon isn&#x27;t easy and making it on the second try is pretty good, it took the USSR tons of tries to finally get a good soft landing.  And recently we&#x27;ve seen groups from Russia, Japan, and Israel try to land softly on the moon without success.

Please please let this bring on a second space race! I want humans on Mars during my lifetime!

What makes this a &quot;WoWW!&quot;, is not that this is the first time humans sent something to the moon, but when one factors in the budget relative to others.Although, I do not have reference for what the exact budget was&#x2F;is.

I was trying to find the schedule for the rover including on ISRO&#x27;s website[1], but the closest I could find was this[2] and this[3] that suggest the rover will be rolled out in the next few hours or may be tomorrow and it has a life expectancy of one lunar day(14 earth days). Anyone knows if it will be streamed as well?[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.isro.gov.in&#x2F;Chandrayaan3.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.isro.gov.in&#x2F;Chandrayaan3.html</a>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thehindu.com&#x2F;sci-tech&#x2F;science&#x2F;chandrayaan-3-mission-to-moon-on-schedule-system-check-underway&#x2F;article67222299.ece" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thehindu.com&#x2F;sci-tech&#x2F;science&#x2F;chandrayaan-3-miss...</a>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;live&#x2F;2023&#x2F;08&#x2F;23&#x2F;science&#x2F;india-moon-landing-chandrayaan-3" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;live&#x2F;2023&#x2F;08&#x2F;23&#x2F;science&#x2F;india-moon-l...</a>

Not sure if you&#x27;re joking.. but there&#x27;s light on the dark side of the Moon, it&#x27;s just called that because it&#x27;s never visible from Earth.I assumed the craft that brought the lander into orbit would have some sort of visual tracking, but maybe the distances involved make that impossible and all we get is telemetry + a rendering to visualize it.

Hopefully they can leave behind a camera to film the next arrivals.

The moment of landing: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=dim8elzo5vE">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=dim8elzo5vE</a>When I look at this, it seems it&#x27;s a long-range optical feed of the moon surface with lander graphics laid over it. Has anyone found footage of the actual craft touching down? It would be amazing to see.

Amazing, congratulations to all involved. Great day for the nation.

Congratulations to everyone involved. This is amazing. India has come so far in its space program. Leaps and bounds. It’s astonishing to witness. While SpaceX has the look - Chandrayaan has the function. Now get Jeb back home!!

Latency is dominated by speed of light delays, which are about 2.5 seconds round trip. Encoding is generally more concerned with data integrity than data minimization.I&#x27;m not sure about the details of this mission and whether the Indians have negotiated usage of the Deep Space Network, but with the large antennas of the DSN multi megabit rates are quite achievable.

There is a latency issue, not a throughput issue

Any space mission is fairly complex no matter the agency private or public.For me the most interesting part to watch personally was the telemetry. What&#x27;s the latency involved here, do they have agency in terms of manual overrides and intervention in case things go wrong?What does RTT look like, are there more efficient encoding of data to allow minimal information?

Really the true wonder! Compare this to the US&#x27;s SLS plans! The budget is mindboggling.

What was the budget, and how does it compare to similar projects?

&gt;It has been a miracle of cost effectiveness. This is a wonder on its own.India has the third highest global GDP by PPP. This is incredibly powerful when you invest in your citizens education the way they have, as the cost of anything like this ends up coming down to skilled labor prices. Their number one competitive advantage at this point is human capital.

And a very inexpensive&#x2F;frugal attempt for that matter! It has been a miracle of cost effectiveness. This is a wonder on its own.

Which to some makes it even more impressive.

re: &quot;Just 4 years to recover&quot;
This mission was originally slated for 2021 but COVID ended up delaying it.

Despite all the sour comments trying to find fault and criticize, this is a remarkable achievement, especially on the heels of the failed Chandrayaan-2 mission. Congrats to the team!!! Just 4 years to recover from the failure and achieve a phenomenal success. India just keeps executing despite what others may say.The team deserves even more praise to be able to achieve these wins with limited resources.

Yes. They didn&#x27;t have a live feed from any cameras, as far as I can tell.

Ok dumb question. In the video starting at 13:15, that’s an animation right?

Probably this one: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;2ngVl6iO94c" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;2ngVl6iO94c</a>

Maybe this one: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=hP0GbRNGMLk">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=hP0GbRNGMLk</a>

&gt; If you understand HindiVideo has captions

If you understand Hindi, Gareeb Scientist has an amazing video about the landing algorithm issues of Chandrayaan-2 <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;4oUdD_QSgRs" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;4oUdD_QSgRs</a>

Congrats to all of the team at ISRO. Assuming the software development for these is non trivial; Its interesting that with the last mission(per Scott Manly) was designed to always select a spot(or more precisely a trajectory) and try hit it.What made them make that decision? Was it like &quot;lets be as precise as we can because we want to get to the spot X because X is special&quot; and thus &quot;Lets let the software always compensate for any errors to get to X&quot;. I am assuming that even at this point they tested the software for extreme conditions. It is most likely that once this assumption was made the Software was built that way, i.e: &quot;Lets test the Software can always correct for any issues to get to X with feedback(like thrust)&quot;. It trades off Safety for Accuracy(to hit X).This time the idea was &quot;Lets select a trajectory to X&quot; but this time &quot;We will let the software prioritize safety(altitude, speed and heading) to be within norm once we start descending towards X&quot;. And additionally &quot;Not make any corrections if we are somehow too far off X if it exceeds safety limits&quot;. It trades off Accuracy(to hit X) for Safety.

Chandrayaan-3 Soft-landing [video]