Space. The Final Frontier.

[Natsinpwc]

Odysseus landed successfully. 

[Dave in Fairfax]

Odysseus landed successfully.

To be followed by a 10-year return trip?

[blue911]

To be followed by a 10-year return trip?

 

[English Natsie]

I'm sure there's no truth to the rumor that the craft was going to be called 'D'oh...'   

[imref]

Odysseus landed successfully. 

the ceo said today it’s on its side.

[Natsinpwc]

the ceo said today it’s on its side.

I think Calypso did it but Athena will come to the rescue. 

[imref]

https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/02/it-turns-out-that-odysseus-landed-on-the-moon-without-any-altimetry-data/

As has been previously reported, Intuitive Machines discovered that the range finders on Odysseus were inoperable a couple of hours before it was due to attempt to land on the Moon last Thursday. This was later revealed to be due to the failure to install a pencil-sized pin and a wire harness that enabled the laser to be turned on and off. As a result, the company scrambled to rewrite its software to take advantage of three telescopes on a NASA payload, the Navigation Doppler Lidar for Precise Velocity and Range Sensing, for altimetry purposes.

While this software patch mostly worked, Altemus said Tuesday that the flight computer onboard Odysseus was unable to process data from the NASA payload in real time. Therefore, the last accurate altitude reading the lander received came when it was 15 kilometers above the lunar surface—and still more than 12 minutes from touchdown.

That left the spacecraft, which was flying autonomously, to rely on its optical navigation cameras. By comparing imagery data frame by frame, the flight computer could determine how fast it was moving relative to the lunar surface. Knowing its initial velocity and altitude prior to initiating powered descent and using data from the inertial measurement unit (IMU) on board Odysseus, it could get a rough idea of altitude. But that only went so far.

"So we're coming down to our landing site with no altimeter," Altemus said.

Unfortunately, as it neared the lunar surface, the lander believed it was about 100 meters higher relative to the Moon than it actually was. So instead of touching down with a vertical velocity of just 1 meter per second and no lateral movement, Odysseus was coming down three times faster and with a lateral speed of 2 meters per second.

"That little geometry made us hit a little harder than we wanted to," he said.

[Ali the Baseball Cat]

Sounds like the Mars Climate Orbiter crash in the 90s...NASA and Lockheed weren't using the same units of measurement 

[GburgNatsFan]

Sounds like the Mars Climate Orbiter crash in the 90s...NASA and Lockheed weren't using the same units of measurement 

I think that the story was that Lockheed was reusing code which was written for yards, but interfacing with software written for meters...

[HalfSmokes]

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/07/science/boeing-starliner-nasa-spacex.html

Has any company been as thoroughly destroyed by MBAs as Boeing?

[Ali the Baseball Cat]

United certainly isn't rushing to retire all of the old 757s and 767s in the fleet. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/07/science/boeing-starliner-nasa-spacex.html

Has any company been as thoroughly destroyed by MBAs as Boeing?

[imref]

Highly recommend the new Apollo 13 documentary on Netflix. All told through video and audio from nasa as well as old interviews with those involved.

[JCA-CrystalCity]

My Dad had diodes and transistors on the Apollo capsules and service modules. I forget how cold he tested them at, but it was colder than space. He worried about the reputational hit if his parts were involved in a failure. He said he felt pretty confident during that flight that his parts did not cause a problem.