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