this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2024
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So at this point, we've been there in person. We fully understand the atmosphere, the gravity, and the topology. We have laser range finding, lidar, stereoscopic vision. Trajectory and velocity are both more or less solved problems by this point, right?... Right? There's only 2.7 seconds of light delay. How have we screwed up so many landings?
... because it's literally rocket science?
I'm not saying it's easy, or that I could do better, but multi national attempts, how many billions of dollars, surely we have to have enough tech to do this with proper fail safes by now.
I can't find much detailing what went wrong, but the main points seem to be that they achieve most accurate landing ever, and were still able to deploy the baseball robot things, which sounds like a win to me.
https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/c5851d0/2147483647/strip/true/crop/2552x1914+0+0/resize/880x660!/quality/90/?url=https:%2F%2Fmedia.npr.org%2Fassets%2Fimg%2F2024%2F01%2F18%2Ftransformer-moon-robot-jaxa-ddeed64a642e82140d690f646e57e47543ee315a.jpg
Wasn't aware of that, makes sense, def sounds like a win