51–60 of 542 posts
Scott Manly has a video on why he thinks the last one failed. It sounds like their landing software didn't have "oh crap, we're way off course, just land wherever". It only had the happy path of "fly to here and land", so when it switched to the landing phase it tried valiently (including flying upside down) to try to fly back to the landing zone, but the landing zone was much further than fuel supplies allowed. Hope…
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Not asking rhetorically but why is this a big deal? Is it because it's going to the south pole? What are some other benefits to be gained from this?
1. No one has managed to make a landing on the moon's South Pole yet.
2. Since the South Pole doesn't get any sunlight at all, it's believed that there's a possibility of discovering ice/water there.
When it's going to land anyway?
13:34 BST
08:34 EDT
Does anybody know if we will be watching a simulation or actual footage? I am asking because the livestream of the last failed moonlanding this year didn't feature a single second of footage. None.
Edit: They called this out now, it seems those are live pictures.
Does anybody know if we will be watching a simulation or actual footage? I am asking because the livestream of the last failed moonlanding this year didn't feature a single second of footage. None.
Definitely no footage, at most maybe a picture if it lands successfully. The only footage we have of any spacecraft landing anywhere other than Earth is either from Apollo or the Perseverance skycrane deployment. If they do have footage, it'll be like the latter, retrieved after the fact.
Not asking rhetorically but why is this a big deal? Is it because it's going to the south pole? What are some other benefits to be gained from this?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not considering such a basic error condition seems like a gross omission. This can't even come from the software engineering, but must be some kind of managerial failure (e.g. we're short on time, but have to report great progress to my boss, so skip this scenario).
> seems like such a gross omission. Almost all space mission code only ever has the so-called 'happy path'. We rely on extremely tight mechanical and aerospace engineering tolerances to achieve that happy path. The Hubble Space Telescope's primary mirror grinding was off by a matter of micrometres, and resulted in blurry images. Consider all the Mars rovers. Imagine some wind gust threw the descending module off cour…
Writing only happy path code as a standard practice in the space sector seems quite absurd. You won't ever achieve absolute precision and errors do happen, yet it seems like systems recover most of the time.
Recently, the antenna of Voyager 2 got misaligned, but it is expected to recover from that. That was only the last problem it encountered over its very long mission - and it managed to recover from all of those so far!
Another clocks are labeled "GHY," "HAW," and "BIK." What do they indicate?
Does anybody know if we will be watching a simulation or actual footage? I am asking because the livestream of the last failed moonlanding this year didn't feature a single second of footage. None.