Japan’s SLIM probe lands successfully on the Moon:
Japan makes history with its first uncrewed moon landing | Popular Science (popsci.com)
Also, the ‘overly complex’ part really comes from the government side. The Gateway, the NRHO orbit, flying a capsule with people to the moon while also flying a perfectly usable spacecraft that could easily have taken them… All of this is to meet NASA’s requirements and keep old shuttle facilities operating.
Without commercial partners, it seems pretty clear that NASA no longer has the ability to do something like this. Who’s going to build all the new hardware? Boeing? At cost-plus prices? They are years late on a simple capsule to get astronauts to the ISS.
Blaming the commercial side of Artemis is absolutely ridiculous. Has Griffin beein hired as a consultant to a major old space firm or something?
SLIM landed ok, no power from panels, stay tuned:
Brian
Scott Manley thinks the solar panels may be pointing west, as the craft failed to do a final flip before it landed. This means the sun will be shining in a week or perhaps sooner. He attaches a caveat to it though saying the public data may not be reliable.
[https://youtu.be/muK6gFtv7_o?si=GfN048qtQXoOk9fA]
(The board is acting strangely, I cannot embed or add a hyperlink without these brackets)
And more specifically (not to toot my own horn or anything), the workaround:
wouldn’t that be a HUGE blow to the whole moon-sniper narrative of the japanese (basically the tech-USP of this endeavor)?
… supposedly there was image recognition to land right behind the ol’ oak tree, based on what the lander sees in real time…
can’t see how that would be compatible with being solar-misaligned … unless they screwed up royally …
The “moon-sniper” thing is relative. IIRC, they wanted to get within ~100 m, as opposed to the tens of kilometers that’s the usual level of accuracy. They could still hit a rock or hill or something that prevents the proper orientation.
It seems the Japanese moon lander landed on the nose… er… on its nose:
Ars Technica article:
(has some extra pics – including one of the wayward engine nozzle)
Brian
Ingenuity will fly no more – one of its blades is broken:
(you may get dust in your eyes if you watch the thank you video)
In addition to video comments shared from Nelson about the mission’s conclusion, NASA will host a media teleconference at 5 p.m. EST today, Thursday, Jan. 25, to provide an update on Ingenuity Mars Helicopter.
Brian
The shadow of the broken blade:
Looks like a pretty significant portion tore off. Compare to the shape of the blades here:
Looks like roughly the outer third tore away. I’m curious how it managed to land upright!
Must have landed in the wrong hemisphere.
That’s my favorite samurai movie!
Not a bad title, honestly.
Here’s a cute space-related story (sorry, Twitter only):
A guy finds a children’s poster showing Venus having a moon called Zoozve. Wait, what? Venus doesn’t have any moons. And Zoozve? But he does some detective work and finds that it’s real after all… (funny what you can find out just by calling the right people)
That is a great and charming story.
Where is the story? When i click on the link I go to Xitter and see the same post, but no story or links. (I don’t have a Xitter account. Does that matter?
Keep scrolling and read all the posts in the thread.
I think you can only see the first tweet in a thread if you don’t have an account. Give this a shot, though:
This.
Thanks for that.