Sad. However this will help in future successful missions. Analysis will reveal what went wrong and pave way for corrective measures. Very proud of my motherland.
I know! 2.1 km above the lunar surface, we were so close! Bummer. On the positive side, our Chandrayaan 2 Orbiter is still there with some 8 instruments on board that will carry out other moon mission objectives including looking for water in the polar regions! Commendable efforts by ISRO, next time maybe!
This type of last minute glitches provide incredible insight to the scientists. Every mission is important irrespective of the outcome. The last mile issue was experienced by three older sisters and one twin sister too.
Maybe little aliens sneaked out of their underground lairs and shot down India's lander. It was on the dark side of the moon. Alien sabotage! : )
Live graph showed what really happened. For full disclosure, I would like to state that I have no professional or personal relationship with aliens!
There is a Japanese folklore about the Moon and a rabbit. Once upon a full moon night, a rabbit, fox and a monkey decide to perform some charity deeds so they can earn some merit points in their afterlives. An old man comes begging that night. The monkey collects fruits swinging trees to trees while the fox steals rice bags from nearby storehouses. The rabbit has nothing to offer but only grass. Feeling no good, the rabbit instantly hacks a way and asks the old man to build a fire instead. When the fire is ready, the rabbit jumps right into it to offer himself as food to the old man, who is touched by this sacrifice and the selflessness of the rabbit and reveals himself to be "Taishakuten (帝釈天)" (the equivalent of Indra in Japan mythologies). He then restores the life of the rabbit and paints it's image on the moon to honor it. Mid-September the Japanese celebrate a "Moon-Viewing (月見 Tsukimi)" day to thank the harvest moon and the moon rabbit legend is an important part of this festival heritage. So you see it's no Aliens after all but just a harmless rabbit and, "Vikram" is his shiny new playtoy! (No worries, he promises to bring it back with him in the "next edition" of Chandamama comics!).
I have been keen to teach myself mathematics this year, rather revise the school maths which was instructed so appalingly towing the curriculum that I dreaded maths, blighted for eternity, or so I assumed as a child. I am amused by books put together by physicians and non-mathematicians who took upon themselves the task of self-orientating in mathematical studies devoid of scholastic overbearing. For me, the impulse began a while ago, out of whim, but that whim catapulted into devotion on reading about Langlands' ambition of bridging discrete areas of mathematics in swap operation. In short, if a mathematical problem cannot be solved in an originating mathematical abstraction, recast the problem into another construct of another area, say, elliptical curve into modal form (ref: Taniyama–Shimura-Wiles conjecture which was instrumental in solving Fermat's conjecture) “In mathematics, the Langlands program is a web of far-reaching and influential conjectures about connections between number theory and geometry. Proposed by Robert Langlands (1967, 1970), it seeks to relate Galois groups in algebraic number theory to automorphic forms and representation theory of algebraic groups over local fields and adeles. Widely seen as the single biggest project in modern mathematical research, the Langlands program has been described by Edward Frenkel as a kind of grand unified theory of mathematics.” Do you notice the beauty in the unification of that language now? Transforming and connecting the abstraction sourced from natural observation. Then tinker around, curious, verify if that tinkered mathematical construct could yield any real-world applicability. In real world, how would complex numbers exist. In real world , how would symmetry manifest. Why is mathematics in schools not introduced with real-world applications. The textbooks were dry with intangible examples distanced from any real-world correlation. Take matrix multiplication. Damn, you are crucified if you don't get the rule of multiplication tattooed in your mathematical circuity, that jiggery-pokery, you are instructed to memorise, never explaining what the heck is even such arrangement and manipulation used for? Watch this video on beginner's guide to matrix multiplication citing real-world forensics. Even the basic - why mathematics -- is never properly explained in schools. Watch the below video which involves advanced topics like metric tensors in an intuitive approach. I was blown away fifteen minutes into the tutorial ..(so that's maths!) I have met people who know maths and are proud of their mathematical sleight, and I have also met people who enjoy maths and are resourceful in demystifying maths. I am ever impressed by the latter who have a deeper understanding of the whys and whereabouts of maths: connecting and transforming imagination into invention. I don't know if the failing has been mine or the faculty that I lost out my childhood to utterly boring and inconsequential edicts amidst the confined walls reciting with my equally dazed cohorts take the first horizontal row in the first matrix and multiply it with the first vertical column in the second matrix. Now when I grasp the beauty and imagination in that slippery language full of generative consequences, I wish I could relive my childhood in the reformed understanding and bemusement at those mathematical bugbears. The thread is futurology, study of future, but my musing is a retreat into my past, wondering if the future academicians will strive in orientation and thought, that I have missed out in my formative years, where students are imaginatively taught mathematics. Not just the child prodigies who figure it all out on their own, but even the slow-uptake pupils should have access to that imagination, if only they were guided through the rite of mathematical passage in the expanse and not the confines offered by it. Will the future fix it? Don't know. But I am thrilled by the present-day outreach, volunteers, who are facilitating self-learning tutorials to emphasise that accessibility in learning, who are affirming the effective detours in comprehension, and those who are challenging the draconian ways of teaching mathematics in schools.
