Called it. They aren’t 100% sure yet, but their current idea is that it tipped over due to lateral velocity and is being propped up a bit by a rock:
They initially thought it was upright due to residual propellant levels, but this turned out to be stale telemetry. I’m surprised they didn’t throw in an accelerometer to verify the orientation. You don’t need some super space rated thing if it’s just meant as a sanity check.
The space explorers have discovered 3 more moons !
More funds needed for further investigations !
I don’t want astronomers poking around myanus for new moons, … again!
Cool! By chance, in a few days I’ll show my geography students a documentary featuring the Chile observatory that helped discover these moons (Nostalgia for the Light).
Ingenuity lost an entire blade.
Brian
That parrot is well and truly dead.
Damn shame, but something was gonna kill it some day.
But it did.
Good news. Maybe now we know it can be done, it will encourage more research into lunar-night-proofing future missions.
Harrrump! I prefer my moon landers to land upright - not upside down or fallen over.
jk
Avid KSP players can see that they just needed more reaction wheels. Or to flip the landing gear in and out repeatedly until it randomly bounces upright.
Nah, just really, really wide landing gear.
Dr. Metzger has a nice little X thread on the subject:
The gear actually needs to be SIX times wider than it would be on Earth, since inertial forces are the same on the Moon but gravitational forces are 1/6.
So landing people in shiny grain silos should work well.
Well, SpaceX will face some challenges. However, generally these things get easier as the size goes up. The same amount of error might be a tiny bump for Starship, but flip a small landed end over end. To tip something over, you have to raise the center of mass, and that gets harder for larger vehicles not just because of the increased mass, but because the center of mass has to be raised by a larger distance (i.e. it takes more work to do so).
The Intuitive Machines lander would have been fine anyway if it didn’t have that residual horizontal velocity. And that was a result of their screwup with the LIDAR. Hopefully, SpaceX can avoid that particular issue.
Starship can also abort-to-orbit. If the landing is too dicey (because of some failure), they can choose not to land and return home. The Intuitive Machines lander didn’t have that option (and it wouldn’t have made sense anyway, since it doesn’t have crew).
SpaceX also has a whole lot of practice now at vertical landings, even in rough situations (like on a barge roiled by waves).
This is so obvious even I knew this intuitively. So why do they keep designing tall tippy things? Is this just because of the shape of the payload sections of rockets? Next time make it a like a flattened oblate spheroid, spin it down like a frisbee, and cover the top and sides with antenae!
a thought (to upright a tipped over lander):
could the lander not have a horizontal ring with 2 telescoping rods (think: telescoping TV-antennae of yore) … you rotate the ring of the toppled lander in the desired direction (“down”) … and then have a CO2 (etc…) capsule driving the antennae outwards to push the lander back into upright position?
admittedly its better to solve the problem than to mitigate it (ex-post in a hail-mary effort), but it seems neither too complex nor too heavy to bring along …
but I think it could have made all the difference for both the japanese and 'murrican landers this year …both of which toppled over.
Yup, self righting mechanisms have a big advantage due to the decreased gravity - and they could certainly serve a dual purpose. The huge lifting power of Starship and its large payload size should allow engineers to build landers with more failsafes and perhaps more suitable shapes for successfully operating in the lunar environment.
One Mars rover was packed in a pyramid that would open out to correctly position it no matter how it landed.
Or re-light the engine once you realize you’re tipping, gain some altitude, and try again. And again. And end up tipped over on the 4th try anyways after running out of fuel.