Japan’s ‘moon sniper’ probe made incredibly accurate landing, but is now upside down
Japan’s ‘moon sniper’ probe made incredibly accurate landing, but is now upside down
Slim probe landed metres rather than kilometres from its target, but a rocket malfunction has left it in an undignified position
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I think it's pretty impressive they managed to do a soft KSP-style landing without an engine nozzle.
Yeah, that's the bigger deal. They lost an engine and still managed a soft landing. They just landed upside down -- but the solar cells might still work.
And for the record, the lander was supposed to land on its side. It's designed to do a quarter turn just before it touches the ground, but because of a slope, it rolled a little bit further than they wanted.
It was so close to perfect!
solar cells might still work.
From the article:
appears to have tumbled down a crater slope, leaving its solar batteries facing in the wrong direction and unable to generate electricity.
The panels are facing west, they will be illuminated in about a week and a half
From a different article:
Angled westward because of the tumble, SLIM's solar panels have been unable to generate electricity, but a change in the direction of sunlight could power it up before the next lunar sunset on Feb. 1 brings freezing cold
And another:
SLIM’s landing site is illuminated by sunlight until Feb. 1, and researchers are hoping that as the sun heads toward the west in lunar skies, the lander’s solar cells will soak up enough light to allow for the resumption of powered operations.
https://www.universetoday.com/165429/japan-slim-moon-lander-on-side/
It's actually amazingly impressive! In contrast, in the past few years Israel, India and even Russia have had disappointing failures trying to land on the moon - not because they're engineers aren't as good, but because it's just really freaking hard to get right and a lot of unexpected things can happen.
The Japanese team lost an engine nozzle and with it about 40% of their thrust as they were mid landing. Losing 1 out of 2 engines is the kind of critical malfunction that usually dooms a mission (like it did once for India); but regardless, their software was able to adjust on the fly, automatically switch into a different flight mode, and still put the lander exactly where they wanted it.
This is a remarkable success where so many talented others have failed. In a couple of weeks, the sun will be shining from the right direction to hit their solar panels and their mission should continue!
Having played rp-1 and had multiple landers slam into the moon at 2 km/s due to random engine failures, having the probe simply be upside down is quite fortunate.
Now I want to play RP-1 again. Never did manage to get to a manned mars mission that survived.
Wait, what game is RP-1?
Mod for KSP.
All the fun of building KSP rockets, and all of the pain of real rocket engines, part masses, ullage, life support for crew, and reliability issues.
You do get to see the real solar system in RP1 too, so it’s a lot of fun. Just can be kind of painful some times.
Oh, that sounds fantastic, I'll have to look for it! Thanks!
If you’ve never modded KSP before, a word of warning: Use CKAN. It’s a mod manager for ksp.
You want RP1-express install.
RP1 is a big mod, it has a lot of dependencies, and installing everything manually will be very frustrating.
Thanks, that's a great bit of advice.
I might have to try this out too.