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"The spacecraft ran on battery power for several hours before authorities decided to turn it off to allow for a possible recovery of electricity when the angle
by RetroTechie 3y ago
"The spacecraft ran on battery power for several hours before authorities decided to turn it off to allow for a possible recovery of electricity when the angle of sunlight changed. (..)
The lander will analyse the composition of rocks in its search for clues about the origin of the moon, Jaxa said."
Not so quick.. does this involve correcting its orientation? Or should this be read as "remains toppled over, but some camera work possible" ?
Available solar power must be a big constraint in remainder of this mission, probably?
- szundi 3y agoNot getting up but wait for the sun to get just above the horizon sometime and then turn on
- sp332 3y agoThe solar panels were pointing away from the sun at the time. But the moon is rotating, and the solar panels are now pointing the right way to get power.
- pyinstallwoes 3y agoThe moon is rotating?
- Galaxeblaffer 3y agotechnically yes, 1 rotation takes the roughly the same time as 1 revolution around the earth which as you were probably hinting at is tidally locked
- adolph 3y agoRelated is the infamous 1982 SAT question: The radius of circle B is three times the radius of circle A. Starting from the position shown in the figure, circle A rolls around circle B. When circle A returns to its starting point, how many rotations will it have completed? https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-sat-problem-that-everybody-got-wrong/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-sat-problem-t...
- Terr_ 3y agoIt still has day/night cycles [0] so that any moon-based solar panels should ideally be on swivels so that you can point them at the "moving" sun. (Or in this case, wait until the sun in shining on the fixed panel.) It just happens to turn at a rate that keeps one side always facing us on Earth [1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_day [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_locking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_locking
- jvm___ 3y agoI'm just laughing at the Japanese scientist who downloads the image data, converts it to a regular file format and then goes into photo viewer and clicks the "Rotate" button twice to flip the image so that it's the right way up.
- RugnirViking 3y agoIt would only be once - the spacecraft is 90 degrees off from the orientation it is supposed to be.
- makeitdouble 3y agoThere's two smaller robots launched from SLIM (lev1 and soraq) continuing the mission on the surface, taking photos etc. In particular at least one of them can directly talk to earth.
- stcredzero 3y agoAvailable solar power must be a big constraint in remainder of this mission, probably? I guess Slim isn't all in the shady!