As a result, mission managers said, the otherwise apparently healthy Smart Lander for Investigating the Moon, or SLIM, was expected to exhaust its batteries within hours of touchdown, leaving it powerless and unable to receive commands or transmit telemetry and science data back to Earth.
There’s hope the probe could “wake up” at some point, assuming the spacecraft landed in the wrong orientation and the angle between the sun and the solar cells improves enough over time to generate enough power, but officials said that’s not at all certain.
Most recently, the Peregrine lander, built by Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic, was stranded in a highly elliptical Earth orbit after a valve malfunction caused a propellant tank to rupture shortly after launch Jan. 8.
During a separate news briefing Friday, Astrobotic CEO John Thornton praised company flight controllers for managing to keep the spacecraft alive as long as possible, activating its science payloads, firing thrusters to re-orient the craft and collecting data that will be fed back into the design and operation of a larger moon lander — Griffin — scheduled for launch late this year.
JAXA’s moon lander was built to achieve two major objectives: to demonstrate a high-precision landing system capable of guiding the probe to touchdown within 100 meters, or about the length of a U.S. football field, of its planned target; and to test an innovative lightweight design allowing smaller spacecraft to carry more sensors and instruments.
Realtime telemetry showed the vehicle precisely following the planned trajectory, pausing several times along the way to photograph the surface below and compare the view to on-board maps to ensure the expected high-precision landing.
The original article contains 1,027 words, the summary contains 272 words. Saved 74%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
As a result, mission managers said, the otherwise apparently healthy Smart Lander for Investigating the Moon, or SLIM, was expected to exhaust its batteries within hours of touchdown, leaving it powerless and unable to receive commands or transmit telemetry and science data back to Earth.
There’s hope the probe could “wake up” at some point, assuming the spacecraft landed in the wrong orientation and the angle between the sun and the solar cells improves enough over time to generate enough power, but officials said that’s not at all certain.
Most recently, the Peregrine lander, built by Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic, was stranded in a highly elliptical Earth orbit after a valve malfunction caused a propellant tank to rupture shortly after launch Jan. 8.
During a separate news briefing Friday, Astrobotic CEO John Thornton praised company flight controllers for managing to keep the spacecraft alive as long as possible, activating its science payloads, firing thrusters to re-orient the craft and collecting data that will be fed back into the design and operation of a larger moon lander — Griffin — scheduled for launch late this year.
JAXA’s moon lander was built to achieve two major objectives: to demonstrate a high-precision landing system capable of guiding the probe to touchdown within 100 meters, or about the length of a U.S. football field, of its planned target; and to test an innovative lightweight design allowing smaller spacecraft to carry more sensors and instruments.
Realtime telemetry showed the vehicle precisely following the planned trajectory, pausing several times along the way to photograph the surface below and compare the view to on-board maps to ensure the expected high-precision landing.
The original article contains 1,027 words, the summary contains 272 words. Saved 74%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!