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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
Here's the hole it fell into: https://www.lroc.asu.edu/images/1408
(Yes, I suppose there are many other sources that could provide images. These happen to be from ASU.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> The top-heavy design didn't help things either Just wait for SpaceX to start trying to land starships on the moon. Also vertically. Also doomed to tip over whenever the surface is slightly out of spec. https://www.spacex.com/humanspaceflight/moon/
Why does this even have to be a problem? We can send small probes to image the moon in incredibly high resolution. It's a big place I'm sure there is a perfectly flat rock somewhere they can use.
Is there any reason why we couldn't have some rudimentary GPS-like satellites around the moon? That could help out these kinds of landers, no?
Still unclear what happened. Did they not anticipate a big moon hole or did navigation fail when the rangefinder failed?
I'm not sure what you find unclear. Navigation was fine - "Athena knew where it was relative to the surface of the Moon" - but without a working altimeter it was kinda fucked for actually touching down. Hard landing, skid, tip.
Is there any reason why we couldn't have some rudimentary GPS-like satellites around the moon? That could help out these kinds of landers, no?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They also have the atmosphere, with drag that will make all velocities trend towards zero. Don’t have that on the moon, gotta do it all with fuel. More than half of the energy she’s by the returning falcon is aerobraking. Yes, the moon has substantially less gravity but it’s also exponentially harder to get the fuel there.
"the atmosphere, with drag that will make all velocities trend towards zero" Did you forget about gravity? Terminal velocity in free-fall is not zero!
the altimeter? Surely you would put three on there?
If I’m not mistaken there are three on commercial aircraft.. Seems like the bare minimum for a lunar lander .. I can’t imagine they’re THAT heavy
the altimeter? Surely you would put three on there?
+1 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 tim…
Not really. They forgot to toggle the safety switch on before launch, so the laser could not be used:
https://spaceq.ca/simple-error-could-have-resulted-in-intuit...