Space - The Final Frontier

Yoheadden said:
https://interestingengineering.com/...beams-back-first-images-lunar-south-pole-race

It looks like Russia will beat them to the landing. India’s mission is going to orbit longer.
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Nope. It crashed.

https://spacenews.com/luna-25-crashes-into-moon-after-orbit-maneuver/

Luna-25 crashes into moon after orbit maneuver

HELSINKI — Russia’s Luna-25 mission ended in failure after crashing into the moon, space agency Roscosmos has announced.

A statement posted to the agency’s Telegram social media channel early Aug. 20 confirmed that an anomaly during an Aug. 19 maneuver to lower Luna-25’s orbit resulted in the spacecraft impacting the lunar surface.
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Space travel is hard.

Russia’s first mission to the moon in nearly 50 years ended in a disaster as its unmanned Luna-25 spacecraft crashed while attempting to land on the unexplored south pole, Russian authorities said Sunday.
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The recent event reminds me of the tv series "For All Mankind" in the race to discover water deposits on the moon.
 
In bad Russian accent:

Heh, Heh, Heh, What you call crash, we Russians call a hard landing.
The Flight controller was scheduled to be reassigned to Siberia.
 
History repeats itself I guess.

The Russian spacecraft that crashed on the moon just prior to the Apollo 11 moon landing was Luna 15. It was launched on July 13, 1969, three days before Apollo 11. Luna 15 was a robotic spacecraft designed to land on the moon and collect samples of lunar soil. However, it crashed into the moon on July 21, 1969, hours before the scheduled American lift off from the Moon.
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India have made it onto the surface of the moon near the south pole.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/world-asia-india-66576580

Wow, that was intense! So now what? Firstly, the lander will wait a few hours for the lunar dust to quite literally settle.

After that, panels on one of its sides will open and a ramp will be deployed so that Pragyaan, the Moon rover, can slide down to the surface.

It will then roam around the rocks and craters on the Moon gathering crucial data and images to be sent back to Earth for analysis.

The lander and the rover are carrying five scientific instruments which will help find out "the physical characteristics of the surface of the Moon, the atmosphere close to the surface and the tectonic activity to study what goes on below the surface".

The landing date has also been carefully selected to coincide with the start of a lunar day - which equals 28 Earth days - because the batteries of the lander and the rover will need sunlight to be able to charge and function.
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Alan said:
India have made it onto the surface of the moon near the south pole.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/world-asia-india-66576580
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Alan:
Your quote was from where?
Wow, that was intense! So now what? Firstly, the lander will wait a few hours for the lunar dust to quite literally settle.
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I'm trying to find video of the landing, but the only thing I can find is rather cartoonish animation of the landing. Obviously from the reaction of the control center and even one of a BBC broadcaster, that they are viewing actual footage, but they cut out that on the video that I can watch.
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-asia-india-66576580
Is there a link that shows actual camera footage of the landing?
Even CNN's video is the same one everyone seems to be showing:
https://www.cnn.com/videos/world/2023/08/23/india-moon-landing-moment-contd-vpx.cnn
I ask because the quote you posted said something about waiting hours for the dust to settle. I wanted to see that, as I've always wondered how the US astronauts landed without a dust plume and how they photographed the first footprint within feet of the rocket blast used to arrest their decent to a soft landing.
 
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Alan said:
The link was to a live BBC stream so maybe gone now.

Here is a better link now. (Both links work for me here in England)

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-66594520

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/world-asia-india-66576580
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Both links show only, and I quote under the video this text:
Watch a live simulation of the moment India’s Chandrayaan-3 lands on the Moon
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Obviously they are animations, not real footage. Your second link is the one I posted in my first post.
I'm looking for actual footage from on-board cameras. Something that shows the dust plume from the quote you provided.
 
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Used to love the animations of the Apollo activity. And when trusty Jules Bergman got out the models, ah, that was heaven.

So nothing wrong with an animation, no?

Much congratulations to India. This is an important mission that I hope reaches all objectives.

Jules_bergman_1973.jpg
 
skipro33 said:
I'm looking for actual footage from on-board cameras. Something that shows the dust plume from the quote you provided.
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I haven’t seen anything like that, just still photos
 
JoeWras said:
Used to love the animations of the Apollo activity. And when trusty Jules Bergman got out the models, ah, that was heaven.

So nothing wrong with an animation, no?

Much congratulations to India. This is an important mission that I hope reaches all objectives.

Jules_bergman_1973.jpg
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No, nothing wrong with an animation. Just that the reaction from the control room somehow looked forced. And when Alan quoted someone about the dust, that inferred that there was actual footage of the event, not just someone saying so and some animation. Then that got me thinking about our own lunar landings. How the feet of the landing module had 2' long probes to sense when they touched down and penetrated the dust to solid earth and could cut the rocket engines. I never really thought about a dust plume at the time, NASA animation showed the loose debris literally blasted away in near zero gravity and vacuum with no plume from the camera footage out the windows. Then that got me thinking about the manmade first footprints on the moon. How could that be if there's either a blast of rocket engine to scour the ground, or it lifted into a dust plume. Two contrary depictions of what takes place as the ship touches down.
As we know, in a vacuum, all things fall at the same rate: a lead weight falls as fast as a downy feather. A dust plume falling gently, as opposed to larger rocks, infers an atmosphere.
I'm not some sort of conspiracy wacko, but I do what things to make sense and lunar landings should collaborate on what happens at that time from different agencies.
I also find it interesting that the Russian mission failed due to a crash landing. Knowing the Russians penchant for not always telling the truth, I am suspicious about what actually went down. When was the last time a Russian official admitted a failure of any sort with a government action?
 
skipro33 said:
Then that got me thinking about the manmade first footprints on the moon. How could that be if there's either a blast of rocket engine to scour the ground, or it lifted into a dust plume. Two contrary depictions of what takes place as the ship touches down.
As we know, in a vacuum, all things fall at the same rate: a lead weight falls as fast as a downy feather. A dust plume falling gently, as opposed to larger rocks, infers an atmosphere.
I'm not some sort of conspiracy wacko, but I do what things to make sense and lunar landings should collaborate on what happens at that time from different agencies.
I also find it interesting that the Russian mission failed due to a crash landing. Knowing the Russians penchant for not always telling the truth, I am suspicious about what actually went down. When was the last time a Russian official admitted a failure of any sort with a government action?
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Yeah, I just figured their talk of "waiting for the dust to settle, literally" was not literal.

One of the last things Armstrong said before landing was "Kicking up some dust." We can also see the dust being kicked by the astronauts and rover. It flies and falls really fast. There is never anything hanging around.
 
skipro33 said:
.... Then that got me thinking about the manmade first footprints on the moon. How could that be if there's either a blast of rocket engine to scour the ground, or it lifted into a dust plume. Two contrary depictions of what takes place as the ship touches down.
As we know, in a vacuum, all things fall at the same rate: a lead weight falls as fast as a downy feather. A dust plume falling gently, as opposed to larger rocks, infers an atmosphere.
I'm not some sort of conspiracy wacko, but I do what things to make sense and lunar landings should collaborate on what happens at that time from different agencies. ....
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No need for any conspiracy. It was almost seven hours between when Apollo 11 LEM touched down and when they did the first EVA, which allowed any dust plenty of time to settle.* They walked around, took pictures of each other and of their footprints in the regolith, then they went back inside the LEM and took off. So the footprints weren't there when they landed and could not have been disturbed by the landing/descent thrusters. Are they still there after they took off again? I don't know. Maybe they were disturbed by the LEM motor exhaust. Maybe not. I'm fairly certain no one ever went back to check.


* There wasn't much dust in any event. Here are links to the videos of the Apollo 11 LEM landing and departure from the moon.


and here is a remote camera view of the last departure from the Moon, by Apollo 17 in 1972. Not much dust visible to me.

 
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skipro33 said:
As we know, in a vacuum, all things fall at the same rate: a lead weight falls as fast as a downy feather. A dust plume falling gently, as opposed to larger rocks, infers an atmosphere.
I'm not some sort of conspiracy wacko, but I do what things to make sense and lunar landings should collaborate on what happens at that time from different agencies.
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Things don’t fall at the same rate just because they are in a vacuum, they fall at a rate determined by gravity.

The force of gravity determines how long an object will take to fall to the ground. In the absence of air resistance, all objects will accelerate towards the ground at a rate denoted by g, which is measured in metres per second squared (m s−2). On Earth, g = 9.8 m s−2 but on the Moon g is only 1.6 m s−2.
 
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Alan said:
Things don’t fall at the same rate just because they are in a vacuum, they fall at a rate determined by gravity.

The force of gravity determines how long an object will take to fall to the ground. In the absence of air resistance, all objects will accelerate towards the ground at a rate denoted by g, which is measured in metres per second squared (m s−2). On Earth, g = 9.8 m s−2 but on the Moon g is only 1.6 m s−2.
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And since there is no air, no falling objects have a terminal velocity.
 
Gumby said:
And since there is no air, no falling objects have a terminal velocity.
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Exactly, an object will continue to accelerate until it impacts the object it is falling to.
 
Just flipping through some pictures, I found this:
cb0ea3d2-0d81-4a5d-a77d-a69d922aaaa6.png


It shows the Indian landing close to where the Russian lander crashed. Of course, "close" is a relative term. I'm sure it's not possible, but wouldn't it be cool to send the rover over to the crash site to see what happened? If nothing else, the freshly disturbed regolith might provide some clues as to what's below the surface.
 
according to my quick calc, even if the dust was sent 3km high on the moon, it would take less than 60 seconds to fall back down.
 
Fermion said:
according to my quick calc, even if the dust was sent 3km high on the moon, it would take less than 60 seconds to fall back down.
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I did not calculate but a lot of variables on Earth are gone on the moon... no wind, air, etc... just pure gravity...
 
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