Japan: Moon lander Slim comes back to life and resumes mission

Scott Manly did a great explanation. The lander lost a rocket nozzle when it was in the final part of its descent - hovering and taking pictures of the landing site. Nozzles make the rocket&#x27;s thrust much more effective so basically it lost thrust on one side.<p>It had very good software which adjusted to this and brought it down softly enough to land but it couldn&#x27;t stop the pitch over.<p>The spacecraft landed within 50m of it&#x27;s target which is exceptionally good accuracy and that part of it&#x27;s mission was a complete success.<p>The rocket nozzle problem may have been due to a stuck valve or some other problem and obviously they have work to do on that but apparently something similar has happened on a similar design before.

Should have collaborated with some of the BattleBots&#x2F;Robot Wars teams to include one of those flippers that up turn an upside-down bot right-side-up again.

<i>&quot;The spacecraft ran on battery power for several hours before authorities decided to turn it off to allow for a possible recovery of electricity when the angle of sunlight changed. (..)<p>The lander will analyse the composition of rocks in its search for clues about the origin of the moon, Jaxa said.&quot;</i><p>Not so quick.. does this involve correcting its orientation? Or should this be read as &quot;remains toppled over, but some camera work possible&quot; ?<p>Available solar power must be a big constraint in remainder of this mission, probably?

The armchairism in this thread is something else. Happy the mission is not lost and kudos to JAXA.

Landing upside down is what they call &quot;the glitch&quot;? How could that be fixed, did it have some way to restore its position? Or only the solar cells were turned upside up? What happened there in the end?

&gt; Statistically, it has proven very hard to land on the Moon. Only about half of all attempts have succeeded.<p>Why is this still the case given that NASA were able to land humans on the moon 55 years ago, not to mention do so in a way that could also bring them home?

Sounds like Monty Python and the Holy Grail.<p>&quot;I&#x27;m not dead yet!&quot;<p>&quot;It&#x27;s just a flesh wound!&quot;

&quot;First Man&quot; (2018)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;PSoRx87OO6k?si=OPCRv2nLyhdvh9Lo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;PSoRx87OO6k?si=OPCRv2nLyhdvh9Lo</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;w4GtJB5WAlQ?si=ASRrv1K0akxJwj-I" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;w4GtJB5WAlQ?si=ASRrv1K0akxJwj-I</a><p>Armstrong&#x27;s coolness under pressure as the Eagle lander&#x27;s fuel dwindled to within 30 seconds of &quot;Empty&quot; is depicted with gripping intensity in this film.

If you’ve played Kerbal, you feel for this.

I&#x27;m curious about this bit: &quot;In a post on X, formerly Twitter, Jaxa shared a photograph taken by Slim of a nearby rock that it nicknamed a &quot;toy poodle&quot;.&quot;<p>What does nicknaming mean here? Is it the lander doing some sort of pattern recognition or how exactly does a machine generate a nickname?

It&#x27;s been a really, really, long journey, a quick nap and like new again.

Does someone has an idea for how the communication&#x2F;fixing was done?<p>Was it radio waves of flipping bits? Or how does that work?

I thought it landed upside down. If so they will just try to do stuff like that?