resolved · Honourable Graves
ISRO’s launch-day plan stated that Vikram would soft-land in the lunar south-polar region on September 7, 2019.
Source-backed summary; not presented as a verbatim quotation.
Indian Space Research Organisation
Mission designer and operator · India
The world at the time.
The spacecraft launched successfully with an orbiter, lander and rover. The stated sequence specified the landing date and subsequent rover deployment.
What happened.
Vikram hard-landed and the rover did not deploy as planned. The orbiter continued returning science data, which does not satisfy the separately scored soft-landing claim.
Predicted vs actual.
| Metric | Predicted | Actual | Variance / caveat |
|---|---|---|---|
| September 7 soft landing | Successful controlled landing | Hard landing; rover deployment failed | Milestone not achieved |
The counter-signal.
At a June 12 briefing, Chairman K. Sivan called the final landing phase highly demanding and described it as 15 terrifying minutes. The agency itself therefore identified substantial landing risk before launch.
Verdict.
Reasoning: sound · Outcome: wrong
The narrow landing prediction failed despite success elsewhere in the mission. The engineering process and explicit recognition of risk support a sound rating, while the outcome is unambiguously wrong.
Cause of death / explanatory lens.
No cause of death assigned
The lesson.
When should a mission schedule distinguish a planned event from a confidence-rated success forecast?
Sources.
- GSLV MkIII-M1 launches Chandrayaan-2primary · 2019-07-22 · claim/date
- Launch of Chandrayaan-II: parliamentary replyprimary · 2019 · outcome and cause
- Chairman’s prelaunch briefingprimary · 2019-06-12 · contemporary counter-signal
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