191–200 of 277 posts
[stub for offtopicness]
Ars has been one of the best publications across my whole experience with the internet, going on 20+ years. Without them I wouldn't have been clued into how broken the internet is.
the altimeter? Surely you would put three on there?
They had the altimeter fail on the previous mission too. Seems like a fairly crucial component of a moon lander.
Armchair rocket scientist here, but if I were on that engineering team I'd lobby hard for less science payloads and more backups for critical instruments for the actual flight of the craft.
The rover and hopper and drill etc all sound cool yes, but worthless if you can't land. Again. For the second time. Because the same critical component failed, again. With apparently no backup, again.
Of course, it sounds so simple. I am sure there is more to it (e.g. perhaps they had backups and everything worked, but they just weren't fit for purpose?)
At what point do you just fire your entire "Land on Moon" software team, and hire a couple young Neil Armstrong wanna-be's, who can hand-land your spacecraft remotely? (In spite of the moon-earth-moon signal lag.)
In this domain, Signal lag seems to be an insurmountable problem, when using remote control. 2.7s delay will be hard to mitigate in a dynamic system. Unless I am misunderstanding something.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What an absolutely phenomenal speech and video. Just a sort of +1 highly recommended thing. That video was crazy insightful .
Was it? I read it as a pretty hyped up version of "old space guy says to old space people that they're not old spacing enough, presents it as rebellion". In particular (and, to be clear, it's been a while) he kept going "why not do it like apollo" when the entire point is that it isn't Apollo anymore. Though, again, it's been a while since I watched it.
That's because the powers that be surround themselves with yes-men or (equivalently) people are afraid of the consequences for stating their honest opinion, when that opinion is negative. It's a problem as old as time. "The Emperor's New Clothes" is based on tales dating back to around 1000AD, and I'm sure it goes back far further than that. This problem destroys competence, destroys countries, and has become ubiquitous in every single aspect of high level public (and to a lesser degree even high level private) decision making in the US.
Notice how things seem to constantly just go wrong in spite of effectively endless resources and manpower? If you look at what we have today in terms of any quantifiable metric we should be able to run circles around the 60s (in terms of, amongst other things, tech advancement) with our eyes shut, yet in practice we're struggling to recreate what they did in the 60s, in 7 years, starting from nothing and on a [relatively] extremely limited budget.
TL;DW: It had far too much sideways velocity immediately before touchdown, likely due to some guidance-system failure. It would have crashed even if it was crab-shaped instead of tower-shaped.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>The space surrounding you may not have a temperature Just to be pedantic, it actually does, which is the microwave background radiation. But that doesn't detract anything from your point.
Is that really "space" as opposed to "the lingering effects of the big bang"? (or less interestingly, the temperature of the CMB photon gas)
Here's the hole it fell into: https://www.lroc.asu.edu/images/1408
> So while Athena knew where it was relative to the surface of the Moon, the lander did not know how far it was above the surface.
This is really crappy writing. That second paragraph sounds like a self-contradiction. Unless "the lander" is a separate entity from "Athena"? Some publications refuse to use the same term twice, even if it introduces ambiguity as here.
the altimeter? Surely you would put three on there?
> The Athena spacecraft was not exactly flying blind as it approached the lunar surface one week ago. The software on board did a credible job of recognizing nearby craters, even with elongated shadows over the terrain. However, the lander's altimeter had failed. > So while Athena knew where it was relative to the surface of the Moon, the lander did not know how far it was above the surface. This is really crappy wri…