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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
Just play Kerbal Space Program for a day and you will understand.
I've played Kerbal. I'm also not a team of astrophysicists and rocket scientists on a multi billion dollar contract.
Because of the "more or less" part of your post. Oversimplifying things is nice for a quick explanation, but physics don't care about your simplified model once you get up there, gravity isn't completely uniform, random space stuff sends you slightly off your path, and your target move in a mostly (but not 100%) predictable way, around your planet.
I am fully down to learn.
I wasn't aware the gravity on the moon wasn't mostly uniform. I've not heard that before. Any particular reason image processing couldn't be used to keep the down side down? Or when the previous lander crashed thinking it was many KM higher but it didn't have backups for each sensor type? I've been following along and many of these seem to be preventable issues when it comes to the price of a launch.
For that matter, light delay to manually change system parameters seems to be reasonable.