The astronauts on the mission had been told it was important to shut down the engines as soon as they made contact with the surface, to avoid sucking up dust into the engines and risking a blowback explosion. He pointed out that the Apollo 11 mission had an advantage that modern uncrewed landers don’t – a human looking at the terrain as the craft came into land: “Famously, Armstrong spotted the debris field that Eagle’s computer was taking him towards and flew the craft manually away from it.” Image used with permission by copyright holderĪn uneven landing field has caused plenty of problems in past lunar missions, such as Apollo 15 which also had a troubled landing. “The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is a tremendous asset that really has done an incredible job over the years,” Leonard David, author of Moon Rush: The New Space Race (2019) and veteran space reporter, said, “but when you get down to the last few feet things starting popping up that you can’t check, even with the LRO’s high powered camera.”Įven with the imaging data available today, “some landing sites will still have unknown debris,” Riley said. Right: Ratio of after/before images enhancing subtle changes to brightness of the surface, M1310536929R/M1098722768L, scale bar is 100 meters, north is up, both panels are 490 meters wide NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University Left: Beresheet crash site, M1310536929R. Although we have tools like the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), a craft in lunar orbit which can capture impressively detailed views of the moon, this only gives a rough idea of what to expect when a lander actually gets close to the surface. One of the largest challenges in the final descent phase is the actual surface of the moon. People on Earth can only watch and hope that the everything goes right, that hundreds of commands are executed correctly, and that the lander’s autonomous systems bring it down gently. This is why the head of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) described the final descent as “fifteen minutes of terror,” because once the craft is committed to the landing procedure, there’s very little that mission control can do. NASA wants to start a gold rush in space, so it’s putting a bounty on moon dirt Chinese rover spots weird cube-shaped feature on the far side of the moonĬhina probe successfully lands on moon for sample collection
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