Priyanka Writing
>I have been reading much about Chandrayaan being a failure, this is really not true! Chandrayaan was more than 90% successful and in a space mission this cannot really be called a failure. I sent out a tweet about this and many people agreed with me. I have listed out some of the initial failures that US faced. They are an interesting read and should provides insight about how tricky this space technology is.
Mission Ranger
After President Kennedy asked NASA to put a man on the Moon in 10 years, one of the first missions towards this was the Ranger mission.
AIM: to crash land on a particular region of the Moon, clicking and transmitting snaps until impact. The scientists needed to know whether
1. Moon’s surface was solid where a spacecraft could land or was it like dusty where anything heavy would sink, or maybe it was a bog of quicksand (or maybe made of cheese).
2. This would be one of the first times that a probe would orbit another celestial body and transmit data, so would this mechanism work?
Failure: Rangers 1 to 6 all failed!! 6 missions lost! Problems ranged from coding error to power supply damage to cameras not switching on! This was 4 years lost without much gain, because most of these failures were too small to learn anything from! Like a malfunction or a random failure/damage.
Mission Mariner
This was US’s first attempt to an interplanetary probe.
Aim: Mariner 1 was to go to Venus and gather data.
Failure: On lift off, in a few minutes it exploded and the craft was incinerated. Later the failure was analyzed and fault was found to be in the programming. A TYPO had been made where instead of a comma(,) the guy put a period (.)! (Another version says it was lack of a hyphen (-) at one place in the code) Due to its minuteness none of the checks and tests showed the error.
Success!
Neither of these missions were prophetic, cause the next missions Ranger 7 and Mariner 2 were big successes! They did what they had to, and gave scientists much needed insight.
So while Chandrayaan may have stopped responding the mission is really not a failure, because it was majorly successful and that is Successful! 🙂
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