Tuesday, March 5, 2024

Why It’s So Challenging to Land Upright on the Moon

(Back in the day we could ignore the Van Allen belt's radiation (something we are very concerned about today) and land upright on the moon with no problems (something we don't seem to be able to do today)  Are NASA scientists just dumber than they used to be? Should we dump all the super computers and go back to the shit they had back then with less computing power than your average cell phone?  Gee... its almost as if... we had never actually been there in the first place)

from NYT

When the robotic lander Odysseus last month became the first American-built spacecraft to touch down on the moon in more than 50 years, it toppled over at an angle. That limited the amount of science it could do at the lunar surface, because its antennas and solar panels were not pointed in the correct directions.

Just a month earlier, another spacecraft, the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon, or SLIM, sent by the Japanese space agency, had also tipped during landing, ending up on its head.

Why is there a sudden epidemic of spacecraft rolling on the moon like Olympic gymnasts performing floor routines? Is it really that difficult to land upright there?

On the internet and elsewhere, people pointed to the height of the Odysseus lander — 14 feet from the bottom of the landing feet to the solar arrays at the top — as a contributing factor for its off-kilter touchdown...

read more here

3 comments:

  1. I believe that in science when you cannot reproduce the results of an experiment it’s called disproving, the theorem,

    ReplyDelete
  2. Speaking of landing upright, perhaps my fave of all the 1970's manned looney missions fables is the looney lander itself.
    (BTW, remember even the 2 astro-nots inside were landing upright---they were standing inside. Not even one lousy jump seat LOL.!)

    Clip still up utube u can see armstrong testing it ca 1967, and barely surviving that barely rooftop altitude ejection when the wonky pos became totally uncontrollable unstable.
    But don't worry, despite that single ghastly test, they realized it was unstable only because of the atmosphere, which of course the moon doesn't have.

    So, to further prove how safey and stabley it would behave in zero atm and 1/6 gravity, they velcro'd to the outside of the looney lander (or something, because they didn't use wrenches or explosive bolts)
    a very expensive heavy custom designed wire wheeled golf cart, complete with a ready-to-go supersecret electric battery at least 3 generations ahead of its time.
    This would have seriously unbalanced the mass distribution of the lander, making it more stupidly impossible to control or correct in the descent, because for every crew mission, it would be their first and only time, no prior practice, to correct anything with those thrusters.
    Yet zero fails (except apollo 13)!?

    Just one of the scores and scores of hilarious unpossibilities in that entire program, which is why when ron howard was researching to make "apollo 13" 30 years ago, he asked too many direct, deep questions about all kinds of things to various nasa scientists and techs, they totally cut off all further communication/cooperation with him, UNTIL they made him a 33 degree mason (up to 32 any schmuk can earn; above 32 is by insider invite only!).
    That is right in his memoirs/clips can be found.

    ReplyDelete
  3. You (commenter above) claim:

    "which is why when ron howard was researching to make "apollo 13" 30 years ago, he asked too many direct, deep questions about all kinds of things to various nasa scientists and techs, they totally cut off all further communication/cooperation with him, UNTIL they made him a 33 degree mason"

    I don't think NASA got the "astronauts" any closer to the Moon than the soundstage at Lookout Mountain Airforce Station (now owned by Jared Leto, btw), but nowhere in Ron Howard's memoir ("The Boys: A Memoir of Hollywood and Family") is there a mention of conflicts with NASA. And there is no mention of the word "Mason," in the book, although in the celeb biography of Howard, called "From Mayberry to the Moon and Beyond," there are two Masons mentioned: actor Pamela and character Perry. Would we expect anything edgier? Ron Howard, in his above-mentioned memoir, says this about NASA:

    "This remains one of the top-three moments of my life connected to a film. The only other two that compare are when I screened Apollo 13 for the NASA people in Houston and received their enthusiastic blessing, and when I won Best Director and Best Picture at the Academy Awards for A Beautiful Mind."

    We have to keep an eye on all the Disinfo, out there, tainting the real information we need to expose the Ruling Psychos. If you publish "fractional truths" (my new euphemism), some fence-straddling, slowly-waking Normie will read the stuff, email it excitedly to his square co-worker... and end up with egg on his face at work the following Monday... never to question Hegemony's Psycho-Disney narratives again. That's a win for the Evil Ones.

    We need to always Fact Check ourselves. If a story is "too good to be true"... it's usually good enough to be total bullshit.

    ReplyDelete