India shifted launch of its Chandrayaan-3 moon lander to avoid space objects
India shifted launch of its Chandrayaan-3 moon lander to avoid space objects
India shifted launch of its Chandrayaan-3 moon lander to avoid space objects The liftoff time for India’s historic Chandrayaan-3 lunar lander was shifted four seconds to avoid close approaches to other space objects.
The delay was only 4 seconds. This time. But with 30,000 trackable objects in orbit and more every day, this is going to become commonplace and the delays are going to be worse.
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I understand the sentiment but a 4 second delay is hardly a story.
It’s four seconds this time. With more and more debris building up over time, this problem is only going to get worse.
A 4 second delay can mean losing a launch window.
4 seconds? Usually launch windows are in hours and days right? Unless you have barely any fuel margin and you're trying to hit a very very specific orbit I can't imagine 4 seconds being a huge issue. But I'm no orbital dynamicist
It's not a huge deal, and if it were then the mission is already balanced on a knife's edge and shouldn't have been designed that way in the first place. There are plenty of technical problems that could cause a 4-second delay.
Maybe if you're trying to hit a Honda Civic from a couple million miles away using an unpowered ballistic trajectory.