Monday, August 31, 2009

Indian Moon Mission "Terminated". And: The Congolese Space Program (off-topic)

Sometimes the juxtapositions in the various feedreaders and terminals are just hard to resist.
From ScienceInsider:
India’s maiden moon mission, Chandrayaan-1, has come to a shuddering and unexpected halt. On 29 August, the Indian Space Research Organization lost all contact with the spacecraft after a catastrophic failure of its electronics, said ISRO Chair G. Madhavan Nair.

In announcing the mission’s “termination” at a press conference yesterday, Nair declared Chandrayaan-1 “a complete success” on the grounds that the spacecraft had gathered some 70,000 images and met “more than 95%” of its scientific objectives....MORE

From Foreign Policy's Passport blog:

The Congolese Space Program

Wed, 08/26/2009 - 4:55pm

Fun stories from the Democratic Republic of Congo are pretty hard to come by, but the third launch of the Congolese Space Program is pretty cool, even if "Troposphere 5" didn't get very far. I feel kind of bad for the rat astronaut on board, though. (Video in French.)