It's Looking Increasingly Likely India's Historic Lunar Lander Is Dead For Good
It's Looking Increasingly Likely India's Historic Lunar Lander Is Dead For Good
It's amazing that, with all of the world's technology, simply landing on the moon is still such a difficult task.
And people expect us to colonize other worlds? When is that going to even begin? I have absolutely no faith in a manned Moon mission at this point, let alone a manned Mars mission.
I would think manned missions would be slightly less prone to this type of issue. Having a person with a brain and hands next to the machinery means that minor issues that are impossible to solve from millions of miles away become trivial (ie. a connector comes loose: just put it back in, dust on the solar panel: wipe it off). It has its own set of dangers of course, but autonomous rover issues don't necessarily translate 1:1 with manned missions.
I have absolutely no faith in a manned Moon mission at this point, let alone a manned Mars mission.
After watching several video clips of a helicopter taking flight on Mars, I'm far more bullish on manned missions than you are.
Isn't it because Mars have an atmosphere?
Still think we can pull anything off if we want to. Also the Indian lander did its job and it wasn't expected that it would last longer IIRC.
How many Mars probes have we lost though? I'm really excited about the current rover and helicopter, but we've had a lot of misses along with hits.
we’ve made iphones, yet the specifics of hurling an object thousands of miles away into space and having every little detail go right eluded us the first time we tried after a 50 something year hiatus. Curious. Let us abandon space altogether.
The beautiful and terrible thing about humans is no matter how dumb something may seem to such an educated mind as yourself, someone else’s dream is to make it a reality.
I never said we should abandon space.
@FlyingSquid @throwslemy Most technology, especially computer and software technology, needs constant maintenance, repair, and bug fixing by skilled experts. It's hard to do that when the hardware cannot be accessed directly.
The state of software reliability should tell you everything you need to know about the difficulties of building and deploying complex/complicated systems.
This is India, they're not exactly at the bleeding edge regarding space tech. NASA and SpaceX are way more promising
Their space program is generally regarded as fairly good to my understanding, they just operate on lower budgets.
In any case, wasn't this mission only designed to last a couple weeks on the surface anyway? I could've sworn I remember reading that the probe wasn't designed to survive the temperatures the moon reaches at night, and their attempts to recontact it were more or less a "it's done it's mission already, but if it happens to survive anyway, it's an added bonus, so might as well check" sorta deal.
As a warning, no matter how far you try to run, India can still kill you.
Sikh burn.