171–180 of 277 posts
Still unclear what happened. Did they not anticipate a big moon hole or did navigation fail when the rangefinder failed?
Scott Manley has a great video explaining what he thinks happened. https://youtu.be/ISZTTEtHcTg?si=0LZFyiCysBiFZrMz
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"However, the lander's altimeter had failed."
Looking at this closely, it was working, however it was noisy. I speculate that they didn't correctly anticipate the moon dust problem. Laser rangefinders may not be a workable solution for future landings. So engineers at Intuitive Machines had checked, and re-checked, the laser-based altimeters on Athena. When the lander got down within about 30 km of the lunar surface, they tested the rangefinders again. Worryingl…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ya the wording was not quite … satisfactory. I think they meant , it could tell X and Y, but not Z. But all three are important. Related - I’m not clear how the article can describe that landing as “not crashing”. If that was not a crash, what was it? Will they call it a crash only if there are Hollywood-style explosions?
Bringing "Hollywood-style explosions" into it is a little much. If you slam the breaks on in your car, your tires hit some debris in the road, and you spin around and end up somewhere you didn't intend to be, but the car wasn't meaningfully damaged (i.e. you didn't hit other cars or manmade structures), you made a dangerous uncontrolled maneuver, but you didn't crash. That seems more like how they're describing this…
I mean if my car lands on the side and one of it’s wheels fell off that’s a significant crash.
Why people make temperature in space a big deal? It's mostly vacuum and has no heat capacity. Sun radiation is the real threat, but the concept of temperature can't even be applied to vacuum.
The space surrounding you may not have a temperature but your spacecraft does, and it will lose heat via radiation, batteries and electronics will stop working after your temperature reaches a certain low.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It touched down with a large horizontal velocity component
That’s another thing that bothered me about this story. They said they knew where the craft was , relative to the surface of the moon. Wouldn’t that also mean they should know of any substantial horizontal (x/y) component of velocity?
Why people make temperature in space a big deal? It's mostly vacuum and has no heat capacity. Sun radiation is the real threat, but the concept of temperature can't even be applied to vacuum.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The space surrounding you may not have a temperature but your spacecraft does, and it will lose heat via radiation, batteries and electronics will stop working after your temperature reaches a certain low.
Any moderately active satellite has far more issues with excess heat
Why people make temperature in space a big deal? It's mostly vacuum and has no heat capacity. Sun radiation is the real threat, but the concept of temperature can't even be applied to vacuum.
The space surrounding you may not have a temperature but your spacecraft does, and it will lose heat via radiation, batteries and electronics will stop working after your temperature reaches a certain low.
Just to be pedantic, it actually does, which is the microwave background radiation. But that doesn't detract anything from your point.
[stub for offtopicness]