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.
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.
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.
www.space.com
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!