Space

lokie

Well-Known Member
Japan's SLIM spacecraft made a strange but precise lunar landing, touching the moon with the tip of its nose as it landed incredibly close its target location.

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The SLIM landing makes Japan only the fifth country to make a soft landing on the moon after Russia (then the Soviet Union), the U.S., China, and India.



JAXA's SLIM Spacecraft performed a near perfect lunar descent until the point it was hovering 50m above the lunar surface, at that point there was a huge engine failure and one of the nozzles breaks off. The lander adjusts guidance and successfully lands anyway, but with too much lateral velocity to reach the correct orientation.



@truthsmiles
Props to the engineer/team who programmed the thing to pull off ANY kind of landing while minus a nozzle. Very impressive!
 
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