Private company landing on the moon today

It is a big deal!

While just landing on the moon is definitely much simpler than a Mars mission, this lander is a part of the Artemis program; it's one of the first steps towards developing the Artemis base camp on the moon.

That's an impressive school project! First university to land on the moon

Yes, but even that isn’t simple, I think. They’d not want to land on top of it, so they’d have to push it out from the lander or have it propel itself away from the lander. If they push it out and it doesn’t have a way to stabilize itself, keeping the lens pointing upwards then will require tight control over that push.

So, I guessed (see below) you’d need power to make the sat orient itself.

However, I googled a bit more, and found this: https://mynews13.com/fl/orlando/space/2024/02/21/embry-riddl..., which says:

“EagleCam will be spring ejected from the Nova-C class lander Odysseus about 30 meters above the lunar surface during the final descent. It will take three images a second from each of its three cameras (a total of nine images a second), capturing its six-second freefall to the surface and Odysseus’ descent and soft landing. About an hour after landing, our team will receive the five images of our choosing. During descent, Dr. Henderson and I will be timing events in landing sequence to match to image numbers to choose the first five images we bring back to Earth. Once we have those images, I will post them directly to @eraueaglecam on Instagram. Shortly after that, they will also be available on @spacetechnologieslab on Instagram and @SpaceTechLab on X (formerly Twitter).”

So, it isn’t a 360 camera, and they’re making 50-ish images and hoping for the best. Doesn’t look like the sat has rockets or that they’re trying to make it possible to make more photos after impact on the moon.

If my guesses/intuition is right we won’t see the actual touchdown (still cool to have anything, of course), but corrections welcome.

better, lighter-weight computing stacks have been a huge boost; that's what made cubesats possible. but the much bigger deal is the dramatic drop in launch costs driven by spacex, even though so far that's only a factor of 3.4 https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cost-space-launches-low-e...

with lightweight computers driven by the cellphone industry, it became possible for a small team or even individual to launch a low-power ham radio satellite or weather satellite. but they can't launch a high-resolution space telescope, earth observing satellite, or high-power communications satellite, nor can they do laser communication pointcasting. and lightweight computers are a crucial enabler for starlink-style communications constellations, but there's only one of those, because that's still a big-money kind of project

suppose that, instead, you had 01980s computing power, but the cost of space launch dropped by a factor of 100. if you need to launch a 200-kg satellite to get the sky-observing optical aperture you're looking for so diffraction doesn't cremate you, you don't care if the onboard computers weigh 1 gram or 10 kilograms. (i mean, you do care, because it lets you cut your launch budget 10%, but it's not a dominant determinant of viability.) with saturn v or zenit 2, according to the plot linked above, that launch would cost you a million dollars. today, at falcon heavy's 1500 dollars per kg, it's 300,000 dollars, which is already a radically more feasible project

spacex's 'starship' is supposed to carry 150 tonnes to leo for 10 million dollars. that's 70 dollars a kilogram. our hypothetical 200-kg aditya athalye space telescope satellite would then cost 14000 dollars to launch. it becomes a hobby project comparable in cost to an engine lathe or a camper van. this would change the economics of space in a profound way, far beyond what cellphone chips have done

for comparison, the csis aerospace security project number for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scout_(rocket_family) on that chart was 118500 dollars per kg in 01961. (but of course you couldn't launch a cubesat on it for that price; it was a military thing.) by 01967 saturn v had brought that down by a factor of 22. after that it remained constant for 43 years until falcon 9 in 02010. starship, if it works, will reduce launch costs by that same factor of 22 over the current falcon heavy number i described above, and by a factor of 73 over saturn v

If you're above the frequency at which the ionosphere becomes reflective (around 30 MHz), why should space be noisier than the Earth's surface? Anything propagating there will reach down here (unless it's something really short wave absorbed by molecular bands in the atmosphere.)

In practice, it's going to be noiser down here, because of all the sources down here.