Russia seems to have lost contact with its first lunar probe in half a century
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Coal rocks are intentionallly evil because they love silicates and hate the lungs of mammals. We also know this because coal rocks always choose chaos evil characters in tabletop.
The coal rocks:
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Honestly, the timing sounds a little suspicious to me. I'm half inclined to think the Russians rushed things to get to the lunar South Pole region first. And if that were the cause of the failure, that would be quite embarrassing. Fifty years ago, I don't think many people would have imagined that the Russian (Soviet) space program would one day be inferior to India's. But then, I doubt many people back then imagined that the United Kingdom's navy would end up being inferior to India's.
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My guess is that if they thought the problem may be recoverable, they would have never mentioned any hint of a problem.
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I'm near certain it was a rush. This is 1000% on-brand for them for the past 30 years. Hell, during the Soviet era as well. For them it's all about influence and prestige. This is NOT a scientific expedition.
Any science that would have been done would have been incidental.
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j17robotdancer
Ars Praefectus
In your zeal to outshine the United States you let your ego trump sound scientific mind.
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That's not how orbital mechanics works. Just like the length of the day varies with time of year and latitude, so does the time the moon is overhead. In this case the moon is a waxing crescent and just above the ecliptic (the plane of the Earths orbit around the sun). That means since it is summer time (and the Earths axis of rotation is pointed at the sun) the moon is very nearly 180 deg out from where the Earth's axis of rotation is pointed. In summer time at high latitudes you get long days with the sun high in the sky and vice versa in the winter. Well at this time of the month the moon is good approximation for the sun in Russia during the winter. It's not exactly as bad as it gets, that would be when the moon is significantly below the ecliptic and 180 deg out from the axis of rotation, but suffice it to say this is not a favorable time for communication with a craft orbiting the moon from Russia right now. Like the article said.
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While it would be funny if Roscosmos tried to blame the failure of another Russian spacecraft on micrometeorites again for the third time in a year, I think that's actually referring to instruments detecting an impact on the moon.
The quote from Reuters is in the context of talking about results from the lunar surface. Other articles also place it in the context of lunar soil:
https://apnews.com/article/russia-moon-mission-luna-25-glitch-0eccbb5427af29ca7fb4c90369389dbf
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Seriously, Nedelin class tracking ships exist? No wonder the Soviet and Russian space programs were/are such a string of failures and disasters, if they celebrate General Nedelin. Someone else explain the Nedelin disaster, I can't stomach that right now . . . .
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Stop, turn around 3 times and spit.It seems obvious that luck (if luck even exists...there's no proof it does...reality may very well be a chain of totally random events) can't be manipulated - otherwise there would be how-to's on YouTube and everyone who watched them would be able to win the lottery, get the girl ánd live happily ever after, just to name some stuff.
Same for negatively manipulating luck known in the US as "jinxing" ..if that was a real thing for example many if not all institutions would employ battalions of jinxers to mess with perceived enemies' luck etc.
Still, in spite of what logic and experience dictate these superstitions remain véry popular.
Interesting creatures, humans.
And curse just to be sure.
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So... it seems like maybe sending your rocket scientists to be shock troops in a failed war in Ukraine may not be conducive to having a successful space program? Who knew!
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I'm sorry to hear of the missions troubles, but them's the berries. I hope that the Russian people understand that if their government was diddling around trying to re-conquer countries that broke free decades ago, they might have a few more resources to devote to real science.
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Yeah, but in case you missed it, the USSR is dead and gone and not around to help.
As for measuring up, Putin does not compare himself to the USSR. He has said repeatedly he intends to rebuild the Russian empire which was even larger but largely lacked electricity and running water. That’s what they compare themselves to.
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Yeah no. The last Soviet lunar mission was 47 years ago. By the last days of the USSR most of their tech was obsolete and in disrepair. The situation has only worsened.
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Seriously, I hope some political scientists and historians write up this mission. The question is, "what can dedicated space-exploration (or other science-oriented) people do to run a decent program within a corrupt funding environment?" The Russian system has explicit payoffs to oligarchs. The US system has the steering of bloated contracts to senators' donors.
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Literally in the thread quoted for the article:
View: https://twitter.com/coastal8049/status/1690601291784065024
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"bloated contracts to senators' donors" -- in the case of SLS and Artemis, likely so. But I don't think the statement is so apparent for a lot (maybe all) of the other US space projects -- all the interplanetary missions, the earth science missions, the weather observing satellites, etc. Of course, senators have some pull in those missions if they get interested, but on the other hand, the scientific results have been consistently produced and the broad space science community has a lot of influence.
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Maybe they should try something more impressive, like landing on the Sun. I know everybody says that the Sun is very hot, but that is easy to solve. You just need to go at night.
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Yes, there was a Nedelin tracking ship, and I think it was the class ship for thee they built in the 1980s. And Marshal Nedelin was a pretty successful artillery officer during the Second World War. So they did name things for him after his death. But putting him in charge of a rocket development program (something he knew nothing about) was a very... Soviet disaster.
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I think the Soviet Union could have pulled off a mission like this in the 1980s. Their VeGa spacecraft were quite impressive. A Venus flyby, dropping off atmospheric probes including balloons and then going on to encounter Halley's comet. That's quite impressive. But it was also probably the peak in their ability to fly planetary missions. After that, it was downhill. And the number of successful Russian Federation planetary missions can be counted on the fingers of no hands.
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Almost every spacecraft has some sort of command sequence number (so you don't inadvertently execute the same command twice - since a decent error control strategy is just to send the same command three times), so a straight replay attach won't work.
Someone with a sufficiently powerful transmitter could jam the uplink - it doesn't take much, but to a first order, you need either a bigger antenna or a bigger transmitter or both. 10dB would be nice. If they're using a 20kW transmitter into a 30 meter antenna, there's not a huge number of players who have that capability.
Most missions have some sort of message authentication - might just be a checksum, but might be more sophisticated. And as of a few years ago, all NASA missions have encrypted uplinks (NASA-STD-1006, if you're curious)
I would note that all these potential strategies for getting a bad command in are hard to do surreptitiously. And it might be cheaper to just bribe someone in the "chain of commanding". $100k is a lot of cash to a person in the right position, versus the cost of a 30 meter uplink with a 20 kW transmitter.
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A Supreme Court justice served on the committee which investigated the assination of President Kennedy. When asked by a reporter when all the facts would be released to the public, he said, "not in your lifetime." I'm afraid that's also the answer to your question. I really doubt there will be enough public data for anyone to write a history of the Luna 25 program for decades.
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Yeah, but AWS and viasat and ksat don't have high EIRP uplinks at Lunar distance.
Those services are focusing on Earth orbiters (although expanding). 300,000 km to the Moon vs 3000 km for a LEO in a higher orbit is 40 dB. I'm sure that they are looking at high power for cis-Lunar and planetary missions, but there's not a huge business case yet. It kind of depends on the lunar mission's uplink rates too - the commercial providers often have higher data rates than are used on beyond LEO missions.
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True, but there is some politics involved. NASA doesn't like failures, especially not for high profile missions. That would make senior official have to answer awkward questions in front of a congressional committee. That fear of failure does make NASA robotic missions pretty risk adverse, and trying to make sure everything is over 99% reliable (which is actually impossible) does drive the cost through the roof.
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Seems the goal of reclaiming Soviet space glory has gone unexpectedly to plan by once again slaming straight into the surface of the moon destorying the Russian/Soviet probe
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1 impact/ square meter/day, as I recall. all it takes is one key unprotected thing. A single impact can do something like open a PWB trace or break a wire from a solar panel. Unlikely event, it's true, but not unheard of. Missions like THEMIS which have long wire antennas find that the antenna gradually gets shorter over time. And the various tether missions use multi strand tethers for this reason.
However, attributing a failure to micrometeoroid without some other data is kind of like saying the upset was due to radiation just because you happened to be in the South Atlantic Anomaly at the time.
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Without disagreeing, I think that's technically encoded not encrypted. But since the details of the encoding are restricted, there isn't a big difference.
That's how I would do it (not that I would want to.) It's not too hard for someone in operations to send up a bad command. Command errors are actually fairly common, and bribing someone making under $100,000 per year to slip something in would probably be the most cost effective way to make a satellite glitch.
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It depends on the size of the particle. Depending on the hardware, it could be much less than that.
I think you mean IMAGE. It definitely lost some antenna length. But I work with people on the THEMIS mission and I think I would have heard if something had happened to their antennas.
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I guess the microchips from pilfered washing machines don’t work too well..
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I think that's overly generous. Any given spacecraft that could be affected by it is going to spend a small fraction of its time in the SAA. The coincidence of an upset happening during that window is at least somewhat suggestive.
The micrometeoroid excuse, though, in an environment full of other spacecraft that don't seem to be having problems with anything like the same regularity...
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