A wave of nervous excitement has gripped Indians in recent days as the scheduled descent approached. Temples and mosques held special prayers for a safe landing. On the banks of the River Ganges in Varanasi, Hindu monks bestowed blessings on the mission and blew conch shells.
At street parties on Wednesday evening, Indians celebrated the double triumph of being the first to land on the south pole and the fourth to land on the moon.
In the final few minutes before touchdown, the lander executed a complex manoeuvre, slowing down from 3,730 miles an hour to nearly zero and turning from a horizontal to a vertical position.
The right tilt and thrust at this moment were vital. If too much force was applied, the lander would have toppled. Too little force and it might have hit the lunar surface at the wrong place.
It was this end manoeuvre that went wrong in the final few minutes of India’s last moon mission in 2019, when the lander failed to change position and hurtled towards the surface during the final braking phase.
Well, I’ll be damned. I was super happy for India, but now I feel a bit of their pride too.
Congratulations all involved! Hell of a job. Well earned.
As a person born many years after the first moon landing, I always thought it was fucking ridiculous that we managed to put a machine on a celestial body thousands of miles away from our fucking planet. That puts our species’ relative IQ compared to other species at 100,000. Back in the Stone Age, our peak achievements were running a long time and throwing objects accurately and at high speed, which allowed us to pwn just about everybody else. Now we’re using chemistry and engineering to produce rockets that can move complex objects off the fucking planet to a spheroid object we can see in the sky. Like, what the actual fuck?
Due to sociopolitical issues, I have a fairly negative view of our species these days. But when you look at our technological achievements, you have to sit back and just stare in awe at what we’ve been able to accomplish. We’re homo sapiens, fuck you. Our closest relatives (chimps) are four times as strong as us, fuck them, we experiment on you to learn about ourselves. Elephants, dolphins, crows, and orangutans trail us in intelligence, LMAOROLF, keep playing with them mirrors we gave you. We are so fucking OP we domesticated cows so hard their anal gas is a threat to the fucking planet. We’ve genetically engineered dogs into the most prolific and diverse species on Earth, and other animals actively seek us out sometimes, because they’re like “holy shit, humans do magic, maybe they can get this weird plastic shit off my ass,” and we invented that plastic and put it there in the first place. We are the fucking bomb, for better or worse. Nothing compares to us. We are functionally gods, fuck you.
For many reasons, humans suck, fuck us. But god damn, you better fucking respect.
This is beautiful. An emotional rollercoaster from beginning to end that at no point did I know what was in store for me as a humble lemmy member and fellow homosapien.
Is it not? There are 2 ways I could’ve intended. There’s the serious use, where I think the joke is actually (unironically) funny, or there’s ironic use, where I don’t think the joke itself is funny, but the use of something generally agreed upon as unfunny is itself its own joke.
I’m genuinely not trying to be overly pedantic here, and I may not be funny, but I’m fairly certain my use of “irony” was correct.
Not to mention the last one they sent crashed too. They made the landing site a lot larger so it had more to work with for the landing. I think the first was 500x500m and this was 4000x4000m.
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