Japan crashes SLIM spacecraft upside-down on the moon and calls it a "success"
Japan crashes SLIM spacecraft upside-down on the moon and calls it a "success"
The SLIM was a joint effort between Japanese toy company Takara Tomy, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), Sony, and Doshisha University to design a craft capable of...
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Lol why is this getting down voted?
It's a terrible headline that completely downplays a successful mission. Instead of focusing on the fact that they achieved a landing accuracy of 55m where previous missions measured in kilometres they went for a cheap joke. This is in spite of having a thruster fail that resulted in the lander tipping over but still able to deploy is rover. The same article from a better website would have probably faired better.
It's also worth noting it was always supposed to land with the solar panels on its side, the issue is that they ended up pointing west (in the shade, not producing power) instead of to the east (towards the sun).
The fact that it still handled the asymmetrical thrust after the nozzle broke off one of its two engines to make it down in one piece, and only the orientation happened to be wrong, is still a great achievement.
If the hardware survives the chill (heaters not running from lack of power) it might still resume its mission when the sun changes position in the sky and the panels start getting light.
Oh, OK. I thought people didn't like that it's an actual tech post. Yeah, article title could've been better.