Athena spacecraft declared dead after toppling over on moon
Athena spacecraft declared dead after toppling over on moon
www.theguardian.com
Athena spacecraft declared dead after toppling over on moon
28 comments
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The first one fell over and sank into the
swampcrater. -
Breaking news, space is really really hard
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It's not space that's hard. It's the stuff you encounter when you run out of space that's hard.
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Like when you run into me bc I'm hard 4 u bb. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
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A hard void.
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When one day we get people back on the moon, is there a chance these devices could be brought back online?
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Brought back*
No need for this trash on the moon, even if it works.
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Well, if we have boots on the moon, at that point we don't need probes like these. At that point you just drop a sensor, or whatever experiment you want directly on the surface.
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Whoopsi-doodles. Well, more spare parts on the Moon, all the same.
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Landing a fridge on those spindly little legs did seem a bit... optimistic...
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I really don't understand the tall moon lander strategy... I mean, if you're going to design it with a high center of gravity, then design it to fall over... Just use two landing legs instead of four, to ensure it falls over the right way. Then you put the solar panels on the side, so that when it topples over they're facing up.
I've literally done this in Kerbal space program, it's a pretty reliable landing system if your probe is tall.
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Company that topled a mooncraft... topled another mooncraft.
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He's dead, Jim.
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This could have potentially happened to Apollo 11, had Armstrong not taken over manually to steer clear of the targeted landing site with some rough areas. Maybe it would have been just leaning and not a big deal, but at the time we had no clear idea what a real landing would end up like. And I would hazard a guess that even though we've done a lot over the decades, the polar regions of the Moon are still pretty unknown.
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…but at the time we had no clear idea what a real landing would end up like…
Surveyor - “What am I? Chopped liver???”
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Seems Firefly Aerospace has got this all sorted, though. Amazing feat for them last week to have a flawless landing.
28 comments
I'd like to share a design concept with IM given that this is their second moon topple:
I mean, you're not wrong. A low center of mass is legitimately a good idea.
Weebles wobble, but they don't fall down!