It’s such a harsh message to propagate, though. A lot of these smaller countries have been really pushing their space programs, and they don’t need “LOL, lander upside-down” memes to accent their recent failure any further.
At this rate, Japan may be able to actually land on the moon in a few more years, take some great pictures, and shove Mashable’s “space photo of the decade” quote directly up their ass. Where it belongs.
I’ve been binging on For All Mankind and it’s been a great reminder of how difficult space exploration actually is and how quickly things can go wrong.
The fact that they accomplished their goal of pinpoint landing within 10 meters of their target should be the lede.
I bet people in the industry are amazed by this accomplishment.
It’s the sad part of science communication. The pop culture sees difficulties and failures as indictments of character. In science, failures are the fuel of progress. In this case, especially in scientific circles, this was a massive success and is being celebrated as such. The upside down part is laughed at as just the price of making the unimaginable, possible. But most publications who don’t belong to science journalism just don’t understand.
Why would that lead to shoving a quote anywhere? Much of the marvel of this photo is the unusual circumstances around it.
We’ve already got photos of the moon.
This, afaik, is the first photo we have a lander that suffered a significant complication in the landing but was still able to deploy a rover to take a picture.
“The lander was at most 10 meters off its mark, according to space agency officials, which is comparable to 11 yards or less.” Lol
Are we adding yards to clarify the distance for the benefit of American football players?
TIL that Takara Tomy (the company that made the Transformers toys) designed the Transformable Lunar Robot LEV-2, aka Sora-Q (“sky sphere”):
