cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/16378924
Sped up footage from Chang'e 6 lander descent
Damn, that just feels surreal to me. I can't properly conceptualize the scale of the moon I guess
Moon has fractal like surface. Big craters look like small craters and small craters look like big craters.
Yup. There are no human-scale objects as a reference.
There are a few landers, yes, but if you tried to use them to gauge distance to the surface, they're so small that by the time you pick them out, it's probably too late to decelerate properly.
Before Apollo 11, nasa spent a lot of time getting astronauts to try to navigate to a simulated lander out in the desert. They used explosives to make a scale version of a lunar field, dropped astronauts off, and had them try to navigate to the lander.
If I remember right, only a couple people were able to even identify where they were on the map, let alone find the lander again. Lunar surfaces are just so unnatural that human instincts about size and scale tend to get you in more trouble than not.
Such a trip, what you reckon the height was when it stopped right before landing?
It stopped around 100m to identify a safe landing spot according to this article.
https://spacenews.com/change-6-lands-on-far-side-of-the-moon-to-collect-unique-lunar-samples/
That's so cool thanks for finding that!
space footage always feels like weird cgi to me
No atmosphere to diffuse the light makes things look really strange.
Not to mention nothing familiar to provide scale. As I was watching I was like are we 100 km above the ground or 100 m?
I know it's sped up but that really felt like a Launchpad McQuack landing.
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