IT MIGHT have been a simple mistake to make, but it proved to be fatal and was the undoing of India’s lunar probe Chandrayaan-1. The space agency underestimated temperatures around the moon, so the probe had been overheating for months.
In May, the Indian Space Research Organisation raised the probe’s lunar orbit from 100 to 200 kilometres, saying the move was to . However, the shift was actually an attempt to cool the probe down, ISRO’s .
Engineers had miscalculated the radiant…
