Lots of optomistic noises about the success of this mission being made by the various stakeholders, not to mention the press. From my perspective the craft appears to have landed in a place where its antennas are largly shielded from Earth. Goonhilly reported a weak signal, not sure about other larger dishes around the world. Normally an image taken by the spacecraft on the ground would have been released, but nothing.
tl:dr, doesn't look too promising.
I've been waiting for Scott Manley's analysis.
Yes you are correct, the moon is in the way.
Given the UK has never - and probably never will - achieve a soft lunar landing, I am very reserved in any criticisms.
Same for the recent Japanese effort.
Possibly deliberate as one of the aims is looking for (water) ice.
I see. One gient leap for Schrödinger's cat.
Gient?
"Gient is a global supplier of medical waste autoclave systems established in 1995 in Chongqing, China."
It's one weird project.
The design life is 7 days. It has 9 days left. (Will run out of solar to recharge battery)
Whether it can take a picture, may depend on what datarate the antenna situation can manage.
Paul
As I mentioned before, one of the goals is to search for water (ice) which if present on the surface of the moon will only be found in the deep shadows in the craters - where the sun never gets to.
The "shape" of the machine, it's CG, seems to be designed for the lab they were in, not for a real live adventure with real live boulders.
Some device designs assume they will fall over, and they have kit included in the design, to right them after landing. Then, say, unfurl the solar panels.
This machine shows a great ability to right itself. And the funny part of the videos, is when the robot pauses and is doing path planning on its internal processor. While some of the moves involve applying dynamic corrections in real time, when the device is in a stable attitude, it takes its sweet time coming up with the next move sequence.
If it was a Weeble, you wouldn't care.
Tardis ??
Didn't the UK manage to get a double decker London bus to the moon. I'm sure that I read about it in one of the newspapers at the time.
On page 6 here, there is mention of a mission 58 years ago, with a lower center of gravity.
And the datarate from the Odysseus could be 2.5Kbit/sec (via the deep space dish or whatever), well below the design rate. You can't send much of a picture at that rate. Any other science would have priority.
And this is a picture of the junk orbiting the moon right now. Not likely to be sporting large dish antennas :-)
Pity about the 5 minute embedded advert at the start (and yes I do have ad blocker)
Try instead
You can see from Manley's analysis, it's an all-or-nothing design philosophy. A high CG. A requirement to do antenna pointing, using the nav capability of the main engine. It's basically a demo of a nav system... that didn't nav.
And they reason I say that, is the set of assumptions is frankly ridiculous. It's a brittle design, with no backup systems. If this is your first craft, it should be hedging its bets.
The only reason this mission got as far as it did, was the chance occurrence of one of the payloads provided by a third party, just happened to be a nav proxy. And the staff were fast enough at coding, to tie it in. Are the dynamics of the NASA lidar (latency) good enough to replace their native system ? Maybe the reason the roll was uncorrected, is the loop response wasn't there.
If you're a rocket company, "telemetry sells shares". You must have an antenna that works, "even if the thing catches fire". And if that means incorporating features to get the vehicle upright, that's basically a dimension of antenna steering.
Paul
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