Rjdlandscapes, 3 months ago

@skrishna

Good news -

"After troubleshooting communications, flight controllers have confirmed Odysseus is upright and starting to send data.
Right now, we are working to downlink the first images from the lunar surface."

ottaross, 3 months ago

@skrishna hmmm, jury is still out a bit on that front, but am hoping for some positive news.

tsturm, 3 months ago

@ottaross @skrishna The lander has touched the moon and the radios are up.

Now let's find out which way the solar panels are pointed.

teledyn, 3 months ago

@tsturm @ottaross @skrishna just before the first word confirming a signal, they were going through the last bits received and I thought I heard someone say eight degrees off azimuth.

We may need to wait for Australia to come online, about ten hours from now.

tsturm, 3 months ago

@teledyn @ottaross @skrishna Yeah, going off center just at the time of landing and now faint signals... either the lander is sitting in a crater or it fell over.

I was a little surprised they would run the big victory speech literally 10 seconds after they confirmed a signal. I would have waited until I have confirmation it's not stuck upside down in a hole.

teledyn, 3 months ago

@tsturm @ottaross @skrishna to get as far as they got is no mean feat, only a handful of attempts have made the journey! But yeah, the rhetoric was cranked up for that one.

tsturm, 3 months ago

@teledyn @ottaross @skrishna Oh, definitely - space is hard and landing on anything is an incredible challenge. Moon and Mars are littered with crashed spacecraft, so even just getting a radio signal back is a huge success.

But I wish that everyone would be getting on board with having a small camera facing down, and running a 1fps low-rez live stream just so we don't have any more of these blind landings with zero idea what happened.

teledyn, 3 months ago

@tsturm @ottaross @skrishna but this now leaves treasure for future moon children to hunt!

The moon hasn't been dusted in ages. As the thrusters stirs it up I wouldn't expect to see anything better than the while noise of the signal we're getting.

From what I understand, if this thing does correct itself, the photos should be astounding.

tsturm, 3 months ago

@teledyn @ottaross @skrishna Lets hope it got down in a reasonable shape so the experiments can run!

tsturm, 3 months ago

@teledyn @ottaross @skrishna Just saw over on the nasaspaceflight forums that IM can now confirm the lander is upright!

So that's really good news. It will be interesting to understand the difficulties with the landing. And we'll hopefully get some pictures, too!

ottaross, 3 months ago

@tsturm @teledyn @skrishna wow, that is unexpected. Nice!

tsturm, 3 months ago

@ottaross @teledyn @skrishna Just saw a note somewhere that they used the two orbits extra to change from the planned laser range finder to an experimental NASA range finder. So they were landing with the experimental instrument on code that had changed an hour before while the craft was circling the Moon.

Now THAT is impressive.

ottaross, 3 months ago

@tsturm @teledyn @skrishna just-in-time development indeed!

skrishna, 3 months ago

@tsturm @ottaross @teledyn Yes! Their on board laser range finder didn't work so they uploaded a patch to the spacecraft so it could use NASA's LIDAR experiment on board called Navigation Doppler Lidar for Precise Velocity and Range Sensing,

ottaross, 3 months ago

@skrishna @tsturm @teledyn good thing they were on the same bus and able to access the signals without unworkable latency.

ottaross, 3 months ago

@tsturm @skrishna yes, that'll be key