Japan's innovative "SLIM" moon lander safely touched down, but appeared to be doomed by a post-landing power loss.
  • sylver_dragon@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    2024 is off to a great start for proving that space is hard.
    Joking aside, it sounds like the mission was mostly successful in demonstrating a precision landing, they just had an electrical connection fail. Given the vibrations that are experienced in launch, it could have been anything from a loose connector to a bad solder joint. Just one small problem and the whole mission ends up lost. So ya, space is hard.

    • fishos@lemmy.worldEnglish
      01·
      2 years ago

      While I get your point, typically numerous redundancies are built into something that has no realistic ability to be serviced. This would indicate either a lack of redundancies, or that multiple redundancies failed. While every experiment you learn from isn’t a failure and negative results are important too, this is likely a larger derivation from optimal than you think.

  • naturalgasbad@lemmy.caOP
    0·
    2 years ago

    Japan’s current capabilities are officially better than the US and Russia, but worse than China and India.

    Hm.

    Edit: for anyone who questions this, answer me: when was the last Russian moon landing? The last American moon landing? How many people who worked on those missions do you think still work for Roscosmos/NASA today?