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Athena spacecraft declared dead after toppling over on moon

theguardian.com

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Re: Athena spacecraft declared dead after toppling over on moon

#201

Post by bell-cot »

Jun8 wrote: post #158
dreamcompiler wrote: post #78

Good advice: 1. Never invade Russia in winter. 2. Make sure your robotic lunar lander has a low center of gravity.

For (1): except, of course, if you’re the Mongol army. They preferred attacking in the winter (swamps and rivers are frozen so easily passable). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_invasion_of_Kievan_Ru...

To paraphrase one of my favorite historians - Every sweeping historical generalization has a "probably doesn't apply to the Monguls" exception. If you don't expect your professor to waste chalk writing this over and over, then he won't grade you down for omitting it from your test answers and term paper.

Re: Athena spacecraft declared dead after toppling over on moon

#202

Post by ForOldHack »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #105
arccy wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

when gravity is 1/6, a lower centre of gravity might not do as much as you think

I think that is entirely irrelevant. It just changes the speed of the topple. Does not affect at all the tendency to tip over?

Physics 1A: the center of mass does not change. It is irrelevent. The tendancy to tip over is how wide the base is: look at the LEM. Big wide base. Did not tip over. None of them tipped over. They tip over faster on earth due to larger Earth's gravity and mass.

Re: Athena spacecraft declared dead after toppling over on moon

#203

Post by ForOldHack »

Oarch wrote: post #179
jimnotgym wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And an interesting history too. The paper used to be printed in Manchester. The London papers made errors too, but corrected them in their second edition. There was no second edition of the Guardian due to the time it took to get it to London

Placing movable type and perfecting layouts could be quite a cathartic and engrossing game...

I have honestly never heard of movable type on the web or is it all movable, rather than carthartic it's confusing.

Re: Athena spacecraft declared dead after toppling over on moon

#204

Post by tengwar2 »

db48x wrote: post #177
ticulatedspline wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Native speaker. I don't think it's truly "official" and it's not typically formally taught. "Elements of Eloquence" by Mark Forsyth is frequently cited as an early source of the "rule". IMHO It seems to be more of an organic property of the language. there's lots of articles on it. like this one https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/597981/adjective-order-g... and it's true that most of the time it just sounds odd or i…

Every grammatical property of every natural language is organic. Only the constructed languages have the opportunity to have inorganic grammar, but most of them borrow their grammar from some other natural language.

This is an over-simplification at best. Some features of English grammar and spelling were planned changes - yes, based on other languages, but with particular agenda in mind. Generally grammatical changes were to conform English to Latin grammar: the stricture that one should avoid a split infinitive was introduced for this reason. Spelling in mediæval times was often changed to reflect the semantics and Latin or Greek roots rather than pronunciation - a good example being the change from "det" to "debt", introducing a silent "b". Later, some spellings were changed for political reasons, e.g. replacing "tire" (the iron rim binding a wooden wheel together) with "tyre" to disguise the derivation from French.

In brief, then, English does have some similarities with con-langs.

Re: Athena spacecraft declared dead after toppling over on moon

#205

Post by LeroyRaz »

jiggawatts wrote: post #74
ok_dad wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shit, NASA does space stuff, it fails sometimes! Do we want to only fund things we know to be 100% easy to do? And don't fucking tell me, "we already landed on the moon once, how hard can it be?" because this shit is really fucking hard and takes lots of cash and a lot of what apppears to be "waste" or "failure" on a first order approximation, but in reality is actually "learned knowledge". I can't believe people thi…

Worse, it’s richest country on earth complaining about being too poor and having to enact austerity measures — implemented by the richest person on the planet who’s personal pay is much, much higher than any of the savings he’s found so far. I’ve seen many occasions in my career when some manager had flown across the country with a business class ticket, stayed in a fancy hotel, rented a luxury car, and turned up to…

This doesn't seem a fair analogy. Elon Musk is not being paid by the government, as I understand.

The reason the manager flying around spending money to attend a downsizing meeting is gross is that the manager is spending company money (that could go to prevent downsizing).

To complete the analogy, you would need to be implying that Elon's personal money should be paid to fund federal services.

Re: Athena spacecraft declared dead after toppling over on moon

#206

Post by inamberclad »

gtirloni wrote: post #71

Not a native English speaker here, my focus stopped at the subtitle "Robotic private spacecraft touched down about 250 miles from its intended landing site on Thursday". It feels odd to read "robotic private spacecraft" instead of "private robotic spacecraft" but I can't explain why.

Meters, not miles :)

Re: Athena spacecraft declared dead after toppling over on moon

#207

Post by ForOldHack »

jimnotgym wrote: post #164
itishappy wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My vote is for a large BattleBots style flipper that they flop their rover around with until it falls in their preferred orientation.

Just don't land too close to where the house robots are...

Could you land a weeble? So it wobbles and does not fall down.

Re: Athena spacecraft declared dead after toppling over on moon

#208

Post by gcanyon »

Jun8 wrote: post #158
dreamcompiler wrote: post #78

Good advice: 1. Never invade Russia in winter. 2. Make sure your robotic lunar lander has a low center of gravity.

For (1): except, of course, if you’re the Mongol army. They preferred attacking in the winter (swamps and rivers are frozen so easily passable). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_invasion_of_Kievan_Ru...

Well the Mongols are the exception: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqcVro-3f4I

Re: Athena spacecraft declared dead after toppling over on moon

#209

Post by busymom0 »

I know space is hard but so many of these missions seem to fail in such silly ways. In this case, this company's both missions had the same problem attributed to its "tall thin design". Why do they keep making the same mistake again and again?

> "The failure of Athena....was almost identical to IM’s first moon landing in February 2024"

> "Athena had the same tall, thin design that some experts had feared could lead to a repeat of the accident."

Re: Athena spacecraft declared dead after toppling over on moon

#210

Post by gcanyon »

echoangle wrote: post #180
arccy wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

when gravity is 1/6, a lower centre of gravity might not do as much as you think

Magnitude of gravity changes nothing as long as it’s not 0. Your CG is either inside the area covered by the hull of your leg contact points or it’s not. It won’t be stable in other regimes just because gravity is lower.

I think it does change the situation when you're potentially dealing with lateral movement. In 1/6th of a g it takes less lateral velocity to topple over.
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