The failure and lessons to learn from Vikram lander

Just to update about the story of the perils during moon landing, how many of you know that there is, right now, a Rover on the surface of moon, moving and sending the images back ! Yes, if may google it through , you will find about the *Chang-4* from China .

The story of *Chang 3*, the one Rover which the Chinese had sent just before this one, met the nearly the  same fate as ours. Infact they were better off than what we have achieved in our mission . The central line of the reason of failure was same - " *Communication lost* ".

However , the Chinese , in their first attempt, had managed to atleast land successfully. Do you know that ?

Chang-3 , also called as *Jade Rabit* mission, or the *Yutu* , had landed successfully and the rover vehicle , *Yutu* , emerged out from the lander unit. It even transmitted back the images which the Chinese put up on the Twitter handle . However, being a communist country, their space programs do not reveal much neither to the own public, forget about addressing the new findings in a trustable manner to the world community.

The Yutu did a short travel, after which it lost contact and the mission , from that point on became a failure. It happened in the January of 2018.

Suspectedly, the radiations and the fine dust over the lunar surface , is where the estimations go wrong as the scientist fail to imagine how a communication black-out will occur as the man-made object will get closer to the lunar surface . Since the moon has no atmosphere, it is comparably easier to land on mars in terms of the technological challenges that the two heavenly bodies project before the communication engineering team. The absence of atmosphere over the moon surface cause the radiation levels to be unusually higher that what maybe there on the surface of , let's say, the Mars.
It is this issue where most of the failures happen. The onboard circuitry , which runs on semi conductor technology, if it is not housed well protected to prevent the ingress of the radiations, will suffer a bad fate and , and this in turn, causes the computer programs to start malfunction . The overall out come is the failure..

That is one thing, we have to understand first.

( Writer is an amateur enthusiast, who likes to follow the space expeditions around the globe , and likes to learn from them.)

The failure of *Vikram* lander can be described in a simplistic analogy of a mariner as the failure to carry the _intrinsically safe_ torch on an oil tanker ship .!