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.
Congrats to India/ISRO!
Congratilations to Indian scientists and engineers. To the hell with India PM sucking lavrov cock in Cape Town the same time.
Moon first too!
assuming no alien got there first millennia ago and then packed up and left
Nice to hear after seeing the disastrous landing by Russia.
Kudos to the entire team that made this possible.
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.
Let’s fuckinggggggggggggg gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!! I just watched this live!!!
Hey they made it. I posted the article when it launched.
I posted the article when it launched.
The real achievement everyone is overlooking.
My head is so big it has it’s own gravity that makes everything around it about me…
Careful, Russia might try to denazifi your head soon.
So Nazi’s are in my head? lol what?
The last two times the Russians tried invading something that isn’t theirs it’s gone horribly wrong.
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.
WE PUT THE APE IN APEX PREDATOR BITCHES
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.
I laughed, I cried, I tried to figure out what “ROLF” stands for…
Did you succeed? 😂
Rolling on le floor
As a humble canine Lemmy user, I approve as well.
I had to look this up to make sure it wasn’t copypasta. It is so eloquently unhinged. Bravo.
It should be. I mean, god damn! It’s beautiful!
Just like your mom, it should be spread far and wide.
2023: still using ur mom jokes
Come on mannnn
My bad. Poor attempt at irony.
That’s not how you use that word
Edit: it was indeed how you use that word
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.
Ah I see what you mean now, I hadn’t read the sarcasm in the original post so I was rather dubious of that claim haha
Back in the Stone Age, our peak achievements were… throwing objects accurately and at high speed
I mean, that’s all a rocket launch is if you get right down to it… \s
Suck it Russia
When it comes to the space race, starting it doesn’t mean anything if you don’t finish it.
Where is the finish line?
Dyson sphere construction, with people living on the inside of it.
Ooh I like yours better.
Many milestones on the way there…
Total Annihilation of the Core Commander.
I know what I’m reinstalling later.
Mars colony now.
Lunar colony + space elevator first
Fantastic achievement.
Well done, India!!!
I hope they don’t fall off!
👍 India
This is cool. I like that we’re paying attention to the moon again. We should already have people living there.
Please go find the Russian crash site and take photos. So much wasted schadenfreude if we don’t get to actually see the mess.
