Sometimes you have to take the good with the bad.
The good news is that the Space Shuttle Discovery had an apparently flawless flight to orbit last night after a launch at one minute before midnight. It’s carrying a crew member and supplies (including the COLBERT) to the International Space Station. You can read more about the mission on NASA’s STS-128 page.
The bad news is that it looks like the Indian Chandrayaan-1 lunar orbiter has gone silent, and is presumed dead. It was not yet halfway through its two year mission, but has done quite a bit of interesting science, including looking for water buried under the surface at the Moon’s poles. Emily Lakdawalla with The Planetary Society has more details.
August 29th, 2009 at 10:24 am
Awwwww….drat.
Still, that’s good news about Discovery.
August 29th, 2009 at 10:24 am
It must have found proof that we never went to the Moon, so they had to silence it.
(Of course, how it got to the Moon to find proof that we never went there is a topic to be avoided.)
Oh well. I hope they got enough data already. C’est la vie.
August 29th, 2009 at 2:35 pm
Considering that India’s space program is still in its infancy, the Chandrayaan is a huge success. It was able to successfully orbit the Moon (no small feat) and take tens of thousands of photographs, somewhere around 74,000?, before going dark. India should be proud of what it has accomplished in space so far.
August 29th, 2009 at 3:14 pm
And in other bad space news, I see that the fires out in California are threatening JPL and Mt. Wilson.
August 29th, 2009 at 4:12 pm
Colbert got into space – but didn’t NASA hear us saying “TOILET”, not “TREADMILL”?
August 29th, 2009 at 6:12 pm
Did they get the results of the bi-static radar experiment before contact was lost?
August 29th, 2009 at 7:29 pm
It ran into an alien spaceship, just like the beginning of “Independence Day”. We should be being attacked any second now.
August 29th, 2009 at 8:32 pm
With both Chandrayaan-1 and LCROSS problems, it has not been a good week for lunar exploration.
August 29th, 2009 at 8:33 pm
#6. awesomekip: “Did they get the results of the bi-static radar experiment before contact was lost?”
From the Indian Space Research Organization press release:
August 29th, 2009 at 9:54 pm
I for one would like to be the first to welcome our alien lunar probe destroying overlords…
August 29th, 2009 at 11:15 pm
Hopefully we can figure out out what happened to it. There’s much to be learned from failure.
August 29th, 2009 at 11:37 pm
Like hopefully how NOT to repeat the same mistakes.
A pity – but Chandrayaan did accomplish quite a bit and demonstrate the Indian space agencies capabilities. They should be proud of what its done – & trying to outdo that next time. (& I’m sure they are & will.
)
One less positive reflection though – is Chandrayaan‘s silent robotic corpse now the first piece of lunar space junk?
Or did the Apollo, Surveyor, Ranger, Lunik, etc .. missions already leave some of that? (Think most of them either ended in independent solar orbit like Lunik I a.k.a. Mechta (“dream”) or crashed on the Moon’s surface deliberately like most of the ‘Saturn V’ third stages.
Anyone got any idea what will happen to the dead Indian probe now? Will it just orbit the Moon forever or crash into it eventually? With the super thin (an understatement times lots!) Lunar atmosphere I fear the former seems more likely but hope I’m wrong.
Good to see ‘Discovery’ is up, up & away though. Well done & best wishes to its astronauts from me and heres hoping for another smooth & successful shuttle flight.
(Not that its likely any shuttle astronauts will be reading this … or will they?
)
August 29th, 2009 at 11:48 pm
@ 9 IVAN3MAN:
Before the experiment commenced, LRO executed a minor manoeuvre to adjust its orbit to the well-established Chandrayaan-1 orbit.
So could they have collided?
Unlikely I know since they call it ‘space’ for a reason.
Still I’d have thought these separate spacecraft would always keep each others orbits clear & not try to share them – sounds like risking trouble needlessly!
August 30th, 2009 at 12:04 am
Oh good. As soon as SC gets back from vacation, he’s going to crow about the ISS module. I can hardly wait.
August 30th, 2009 at 2:46 am
Ummmm, Phil, I think I found out what happened to the Indian Probe:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HArUmqqiL0s
August 30th, 2009 at 4:20 am
Considering the time and money we Indians can afford for space programs, Chandrayaan-1 is really a great step. But the bad news is that India (ie ISRO) does so little to interest the general public in its space programs. Very less photos taken by Chandrayan-1 made it to the TV and newspapers and children here know almost nothing about it
August 30th, 2009 at 7:55 am
I blame the Sycorax. (The Doctor Who race, not the Shakespeare character or the moon of Uranus.)
August 30th, 2009 at 9:14 am
@Flying sardines:
Now I’m no expert here, but I recall hearing somewhere (Astronomy Cast?) that the Moon’s gravity has enough irregularities that lots of corrections need to be made to keep something in orbit around it. I’m willing to bet Chandrayaan’s fate is to crash into the Moon. Can anyone else confirm this?
August 30th, 2009 at 9:18 am
Well, that sucks! But India showed all of us what a creative nation can do.
Rest in pieces, Chandrayaan-1. [I assume all close moon orbiters will eventually crash due to the gravity inhomogeneities?!]
@ Flying Sardines, Levi:
Hopefully someone in the know will tell us.
Meanwhile, from a Wikipedia page with references:
August 30th, 2009 at 9:51 am
By reading this, I just released how much Western support are they getting… 6 out of 11 instruments are from EU and NASA. The data relay center is at John Hopkin Uni.. and India still fail…
August 30th, 2009 at 10:19 am
Levy, you’re right about the instability of lunar orbits. At low altitudes, the gravitational irregularities tend to cause a spacecraft’s orbit to become successively more and more eccentric (thinner and thinner ellipse) until it augurs into the ground. At 200 km altitude, the ISRO is predicting that the spacecraft will impact in about 1000 days. At high lunar orbits, a spacecraft tends to be tugged out of the orbit by the Earth.
August 30th, 2009 at 12:00 pm
Why would the Moon’s gravity have irregularities? Unless it was hollowed out in some places?
So Aliens knocked out both LCROSS and Chandrayaan 1 in the same week? Something must have upset them. Guess planning to bomb the Moon with LCROSS not such a good idea after all.
August 30th, 2009 at 12:28 pm
hammster (#22) there are concentrations of mass underneath the Moon’s surface, called mascons. A google search will reveal much about them.
August 30th, 2009 at 12:30 pm
@hammster (#22)…
LCROSS is still out there happily doing it’s thing. It lost some fuel (thanks to the aliens), but it’s still on it’s suicide mission for October.
August 31st, 2009 at 12:28 am
As an indian i feel proud of this achievement. Also india is not a rich country and cant afford to have many failures in the space missions. ISRO runs on a very thin budget with the scientists drawing 1/10th of the salaries NASA and all offers. Wish all the very best for ISRO.
August 31st, 2009 at 6:33 am
India’s moon mission will help it learn a lot. I am sure its next mission will be successful. and infact this is also quite successful , most of the nations failed in their first moon attempt…… Just India’s scientist should keep getting Goverment support.
August 31st, 2009 at 9:08 am
Torbjörn Larsson, quoting Wikipedia:
Who are these “lunar mascons”, and what can we do to get them to stop messing around with the Moon’s gravity? Can’t Commander Straker do something about them?
August 31st, 2009 at 12:48 pm
Nasa had a lot of space probes fail most books only list the sucesses and disregerd the falures for example out of 9 ranger probes only 3 worked
space exploreation is a trail and error project
August 31st, 2009 at 2:43 pm
@kevin (#24)
The Aliens still likely have plans for LCROSS’s demise. Let’s hope they have a sense of humor and reprograms it to orbit around Kim Kardashian’s home and image her orbs.
August 31st, 2009 at 10:47 pm
@ 18. Levi & 19. Torbjörn Larsson, OM :
Thanks! I’m kind of glad to hear that. Cluttering up Earth’s orbit is bad enough.
September 1st, 2009 at 6:12 am
By reading this, I just released how much Western support are they getting… 6 out of 11 instruments are from EU and NASA. The data relay center is at John Hopkin Uni.. and India still fail…
…………….
smoothnoodle, that is not called help, it’s called international cooperation. something we all could learn.
in the period of planning chandrayan ISRO declared it was putting aside some payload for international instrument packages. the five from india already covered a number more than what most lunar probes carry, but since this was to be one of the few probes visiting moon in sometime, there were a lot of interesting packages around the world which didn’t have a probe to ride to the moon.
one might even say it was a favour granted to NASA and ESA by ISRO !
and the john hopkins data center was used for that particular experiment, and that too because it was nearest visible from chandrayan at the time.
trust me all space vehicles use tracking centres from around the world, not just chandrayan.
oh, and NASA has managed more and larger failures, that is not a commentary on their competence !
September 1st, 2009 at 11:28 am
@ #20
Smoothnoodle,
The 6 instruments which you are mentioning were just payloads. Just think of a courier delivery van and you will understand what it is. They have done us a favor by carrying our stuff. Hope this arrangement continues as this benefits all involved. Good job Indians, way to go..