Delhi, we have a problem
India successfully launched a rocket to the moon!
It looks like the country of India is on its way to the Moon! The rocket carrying the Chandrayaan-1 Moon probe launched successfully yesterday (or today, depending on what side of the dateline you’re one). The package is currently orbiting the Earth, and will soon do a burn that will send it to the Moon. Around November 8 it should reach the Moon and settle into its mapping orbit 100 km above the lunar surface.
Once there, its 11 instruments (two from NASA, and five built in India, with the rest built by ESA and Bulgaria) will scan the Moon, making stereoscopic terrain maps, doing mineralogical studies, and — most coolly — dropping a 29 kilogram probe (complete with a video camera and a flag of India) that will impact the surface.
What has our space program done lately? Oh right, the complained about the blogosphere picking on them:
Unfounded criticism of America’s next-generation moon rocket is hurting NASA morale but hasn’t stopped progress on the craft, the space agency’s administrator Michael Griffin said Tuesday.
Griffin said critics in the media and on anonymous Internet blogs can ‘chip away’ at the agency by questioning the motives and ethics of engineers designing the new rockets.
Briefing charts used by NASA managers sometimes show up on Web sites without the proper context, he said, and opponents of the agency’s plans to replace the space shuttle with two new rockets have wrongly accused NASA managers of incompetence and worse.
“”Are we at a place where differences of engineering (opinion) are cited as evidence of lying or malfeasance? This is not how any of us were taught to conduct an engineering discussion,’ he said at a symposium of top NASA leaders and industry executives in Alabama.”
Congrats India!
