Trending news this weekend: the apparent failure of ISRO's moon lander. Surprising: almost every media outlet, and majority of mansplainers on social media are calling it a success. 99% success.
When the Vikram lander’s autonomous descent manoeuvre didn’t go as planned, scientists of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) looked surprised and dejected at once in the mission control room in Bengaluru. There was the gentle, thoughtful reminder at the back of everyone’s minds, ready to prance at the first outward sign of sorrow, that the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter was still functional and whose scientific payload could still salvage the mission’s dignity.
Sending a spacecraft to another planet/moon, inserting it into orbit, and landing a rover…these are all the extremities of research and engineering. To be able to just take off from the earth is feat in itself. Success should be celebrated, rightly so. But nationalism bubbling over means people are not able to call a spade a spade.
A private Israeli mission named Beresheet attempted and failed to soft-land on the Moon in April this year.The Americans and Russians have together tried around 20 soft-landings and succeeded 16 times. On the flip side, these two countries pioneered the technologies required to achieve this feat at an accelerated pace during the Cold War space race, so perhaps an adjustment must be made for the failure rate.
The lander failed, plain and simple. There will be ways to study the moon remotely, from an orbitter, but the lander was crucial to gather data from the physical surface.
And as we do in our field, go back to the drawing board. Learn what went wrong, and try and fix it the next time.
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