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Japanese moon lander touches down, but crippled by mission-ending power glitch (www.cbsnews.com)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 11 months ago (1 children)

2024 is off to a great start for proving that space is hard.
Joking aside, it sounds like the mission was mostly successful in demonstrating a precision landing, they just had an electrical connection fail. Given the vibrations that are experienced in launch, it could have been anything from a loose connector to a bad solder joint. Just one small problem and the whole mission ends up lost. So ya, space is hard.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago

While I get your point, typically numerous redundancies are built into something that has no realistic ability to be serviced. This would indicate either a lack of redundancies, or that multiple redundancies failed. While every experiment you learn from isn't a failure and negative results are important too, this is likely a larger derivation from optimal than you think.