It's really hard to touch down on the lunar surface.

Japan’s moon landing picture might be the space photo of the decade::undefined

  • cley_faye@lemmy.worldEnglish
    41·
    10 months ago

    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.

    • linearchaos@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      10 months ago

      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.