Vikram lander touches down at lunar south pole shortly after 6pm India time

India has become the first country to successfully land a spacecraft near the south pole of the moon.

  • TWeaKEnglish
    37•1 year ago

    Amazing stuff. After Japan’s failed landing recently, it’s nice to see a success story.

      • TWeaKEnglish
        28•1 year ago

        The Japanese lander crashed in April this year, it got confused about its altitude due to passing over craters and thought it was on the ground when it was still a couple hundred meters up (edit: lol, about 50 hundred, ie 5km), then fell down and crashed.

        India last tried in 2019, but that also failed to land, iirc that was (partly?) due to some thrust asymmetry.

        Russia didn’t even establish their proper lunar orbit and crashed the whole thing straight into the moon.

        Scott Manley has videos covering the details of these, eg Japan’s. I’m sure he’ll have videos about today’s landing soon enough.

        Edit2: Scott Manley’s video for India’s Chandrayaan 2 failure in 2019. I don’t think much information has come out about Russia’s recent failure yet.