back to article Japan's lander wakes up, takes blurry snap of Moon

Japan's Moon lander has woken up on the lunar surface and begun transmitting data back to controllers at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA.) The Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) made a successful landing on the lunar surface on January 19 but had to be shut down after only a few hours of operation due to …

  1. A Non e-mouse Silver badge
    Pint

    The probe travelled quarter of a million miles, lost an engine yet soft landed only landed 55 meters away from the planned landing location.

  2. AndrueC Silver badge
  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    So it was only going to have a life of ~10 days anyway? Then it's been more successful (percentage wise) than I thought.

  4. aerogems Silver badge
    Stop

    Just five more minutes, ma!

    All told, however... getting within 100m of your target in a situation like this is still pretty impressive. The engineers and other staff involved in this project have nothing at all to feel bad about. As I mentioned in the comments of a different story, NASA infamously lost an entire probe because someone didn't convert between SI and Metric, so things could have been a lot worse.

    1. aks

      Re: Just five more minutes, ma!

      SI *is* metric. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_System_of_Units

      The problem was between American feet and inches and metric.

  5. biddibiddibiddibiddi Bronze badge

    Just before they expect to shut it down or have it lose power, they just flare the remaining engine and see if it will flip over. Nothing lost at that point if it fails.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Maybe using one or some combination of directional thrusters? C'mon, let's just rock that big vending machine back and forth a couple times!

      What would Zapp Brannigan do?

      1. biddibiddibiddibiddi Bronze badge

        What absolutely amazes me though is that they didn't have any sort of sensors or even camera views that could have told them what had happened during the course of the approach or landing, right away. How did the thing even know how to land if it didn't have sensors that could have immediately told it what its own orientation was and transmitted that data to JAXA? Why were no cameras active as soon as it landed that could tell them what happened?

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          "right away" could be a bit optimistic, as there is a slight latency for signals from a craft on the lunar surface to get to earth. Then, once someone has been able to react and take action there's a similar latency to transmit a corrective instruction back to the craft. At this sort of distance real time control isn't really an option.

          1. biddibiddibiddibiddi Bronze badge

            That's a bit pedantic. I didn't mean instantaneously, violating the laws of physics. The craft itself had to have some sort of self-direction in response to sensor data in order to react to small changes in orientation during landing. Even stuff landing on Mars is able to manage that most of the time.

        2. Natalie Gritpants Jr
          Joke

          Also, why didn't they put some solar cells on the bottom in case this happened?

          1. biddibiddibiddibiddi Bronze badge

            Well you can't cover for every possible eventuality. You can't design a lander to be fully-functional regardless of which side lands up, and they presumed that it WOULD land right-side-up, so designing it to have functional solar power if it accidentally landed upside-down would be a lot of extra effort, hardware and cost for an unlikely situation that wouldn't have helped it very much. Even if it's able to get some power the way it's sitting, it's not going to be able to do a lot of the science it was intended for.

        3. Andy The Hat Silver badge

          "they didn't have any sort of sensors ..."

          Why didn't I think of that? Doh! Try watching the landing sequence (search engines are available) which was transmitted live and was constructed *only* from multiple live streams of sensor data.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "opted to dodge a potential obstacle"

    Would that obstacle be the engine bell that fell off?

  7. Zola

    Should have installed a Srimech - every 9 year old on Robot Wars knows their value in situations like this.

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