Private Japanese lunar lander enters orbit around moon ahead of a June touchdown

https://phys.org/news/2025-05-private-japanese-lunar-lander-orbit.html

by pseudolus • 1 year ago

212 59 1 year ago

ionwake7• 1 year ago

funny how the moon is almost exactly 400x smaller and 400x closer then the sun, perfectly sized for solar eclipess – makes you wonder how lucky we are to study coronal ejections and anomalies like that.

like im sure that not common right? maybe it is i dunno

frotaur• 1 year ago

Nope, a coincidence. We are extremely lucky

ionwake7• 1 year ago

Luck is a funny thing isnt it. My favorite quote is "When skill meets ignorance, we call it luck."

dmurray• 1 year ago

Couldn't you study coronal ejections just as well if the moon were bigger? You wouldn't see them on all sides of the moon at once, but in return you'd have more total solar eclipses.

From an aesthetic point of view, we're uniquely lucky to have the moon just the right size for beautiful eclipse phenomena like the diamond ring, but for science I don't think it makes a big difference.

ionwake7• 1 year ago

Apparently if being the perfect size allows for this: Gravitational lensing verification during a solar eclipse relies on the Sun being just barely covered to observe the bending of starlight near its edge.

If the Moon were significantly larger than the Sun:

The Moon would block not just the Sun but also the surrounding starlight, making it impossible to observe the light bending around the Sun’s edge.

As a result, Einstein’s prediction of light bending around the Sun, famously confirmed during the 1919 eclipse, would not have been observable.

I used chatgpt i ahve no idea wat it means

EDIT> previous comment i made was unhelpful because i forgot how to read

ck22• 1 year ago

The thing about sentient life is we are always finding it odd that everything seems just right for our evolution when that's why it happened in the first place.

Temperatures, resources, distances, orbits, etc.

If there's a world out there without a moon and could not really see other plants and stars, would they have developed the math and science that we have without such motivation? Maybe but slower?

But without our extra large moon, at the right mass and distance, helping tides and lighting the night for hunting, would life even exist? Maybe but not as advanced or a lot slower evolution?

(it's kinda like that Star Trek Voyager episode where they inspire a planet to industrialize after being trapped in their orbit in a dramatic time dilation)

card_zero• 1 year ago

S6E12, "Blink of an Eye": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_of_an_Eye_(Star_Trek:_Vo...

an0malous3• 1 year ago

Yes but that’s an argument for why life bearing planets might have larger moons relative to the planet’s size, how would the moon’s apparent size relative to the sun influence evolution?

mmooss6• 1 year ago

If there's a world out there without a moon and could not really see other plants and stars, would they have developed the math and science that we have without such motivation? Maybe but slower?

They would have other advantages and disadvantages, and develop math for different reasons. Then they'd look at our planet and say, 'lacking our conditions, how could they develop mathematics?'

an0malous3• 1 year ago

It’s one of many lunar anomalies, read “Who Built the Moon?” by Alan Butler if you’re curious.

eddyg• 1 year ago

For ref: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Who_Built_the_Moon%3F

rssoconnor• 1 year ago

It's also a temporary anomaly as the moon has been moving and continues to move further away from the earth. See Lunar Recession.

an0malous3• 1 year ago

Temporary on the scale of 600 million years or more

https://archive.is/2024.04.12-145123/https://www.nytimes.com...

jfengel3• 1 year ago

It's extremely rare. It occurs nowhere else in the solar system, and isn't even true for the vast majority of Earth's history and future. We could survey a million exoplanets and likely not find even one single other example.

Neat, though.

sdeframond2• 1 year ago

There are so many rare things that it is not rare to witness a rare thing.

Like someone's exactly 2.000 meters tall. How rare is that ? Well, just as rare as someone being exactly 1.999 meters talls eh.

yieldcrv• 1 year ago

almost exactly 400x smaller and 400x closer then the sun, perfectly sized for solar eclipess

for now.

this is purely coincidence that you are observing at this point in time, its getting further away

intunderflow• 1 year ago

I do worry the incentives for this will always be at the whim of state support for exploration, unfortunately there's no natural incentive to really kick private spaceflight off in a major way

ikt• 1 year ago

Tokyo-based ispace

I cannot believe the old Apple naming scheme is still hanging around, I get that I'm irrationally hating this style of name but I just don't understand, why do I see it as peak lack of creativity?

It's like whenever you can't think of a name for something just go with e-thing or i-thing

Waterluvian• 1 year ago

Up there is also “Spacr” or “Spacely”. Then next is naming your company after some famous scientist or engineer. Then adding X to it. Then naming it a division of an existing company. Then naming it after a living person. Then naming it something new.

I think the most creative name would likely just be a UUID.

harpiaharpyja• 1 year ago

A UUID wouldn't be creative, well, except for the very first time.

Sure, they are all unique. But also very high entropy.

tzs• 1 year ago

Seriously, I wish each company would use a UUID as an alternate name. Same for each programming language, software project, and so on. The UUID should be on all their web pages.

People who write articles or blogs about them should use the normal name but somewhere should have a table giving the UUIDs of the things they mention.

Then when people are trying to find pages about things with names that are terrible for searching like X or Go they could use the UUID.

notahacker• 1 year ago

Astro/astral/astra seems to be the most overused prefix in the space industry, to the point you really struggle to distinguish between entities

Cf the propulsion startup ThrustMe

tmtvl2• 1 year ago

Don't forget Spacey McSpaceface.

varjag• 1 year ago

It's not really better with the startup scene everyone here knows and loves. The hard -r apps that just won't go away (from Flickr to Grindr), endless Libyan domains that slowly gave way to -ify and other fads.

jfengel3• 1 year ago

It seems to be a matter of timing. The "r" fad happened when some important niches were being opened. The ly and ify fads just don't seem to have coincided with anything anyone needed or wanted.

I'm sure there's some new fad waiting around the corner in both TLDs and application domains. We'll have to see if any of the apps turn out to be useful and sticks around. The TLD fad will surely explode and then disappear.

wil421• 1 year ago

Didn’t IBM and others use it before Apple? IBM iSeries came out before the iMac. I think a few companies were using small e and i at the time for the “cool” factor. Intel jumped on the bandwagon after the iMac, IIRC.

dec0dedab0de• 1 year ago

Cisco had an ios and iphone before apple. though Im not sure the cisco iphone was actually ever released

akovaski• 1 year ago

IBM rebranded AS/400 to iSeries in 2000, which is after the iMac came out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_eServer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMac

duxup• 1 year ago

I kinda like it in a.. almost retro style.

dmix• 1 year ago

The company started in 2010

mmooss6• 1 year ago

Maybe it means something different in Japan, where the primary language and cultural impact of Apple is different.

eabeezxjc• 1 year ago

I would like the lunar satellite to have the ability to broadcast messages to earth. Such an emergency communication, even one way like othernet.is

jfengel3• 1 year ago

Lunar orbiters spend half their time on the far side of the moon, where they can't access earth. You'd need a constellation to provide any kind of emergency system.

There must exist a lunasynchronous orbit that would remain over the earth side of the moon, though I'm not sure if its close enough to the moon to avoid being perturbed by the earth and kicked out.

dabluecaboose• 1 year ago

There must exist a lunasynchronous orbit that would remain over the earth side of the moon, though I'm not sure if its close enough to the moon to avoid being perturbed by the earth and kicked out.

Selenostationary orbits (The astrodynamics terms generally take the Greek name) are indeed unstable and vulnerable to perturbation. Instead, you can have a trajectory around one of the Earth-Moon LaGrange points (points where the gravitational pull from each body is equal)

jiehong• 1 year ago

Is othernet easy to access? The receiver they sell on that website is sold out.

Is there a list of programs available?

myself248• 1 year ago

I believe the signal was shut down at the end of last year.

It was a long experiment, but just an experiment, since it never found a way to sustain itself economically.

More's the pity; it was really fascinating.

tjpnz• 1 year ago

Resilience is such a boring name for a lunar lander given all of the Japanese mythology about the moon. I hope someday there'll be a Kaguya-hime[0].

0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_the_Bamboo_Cutte...

Simon_O_Rourke• 1 year ago

Like the quip about public transport, particularly busses. Decades go by without a lander, then a lot of them turn up at once.

tmtvl2• 1 year ago

It's easy to get buses to arrive on time: just get rid of all the cars that get in the way.

SoftTalker• 1 year ago

It’s easy to drive in the city, just get rid of all the buses that are constantly stopping in front of you.

XorNot• 1 year ago

It's because a bus is allowed to be late but never early.

cybernoodles• 1 year ago

Hopefully they fixed their toxic culture that caused their previous crash.

https://www.ft.com/content/a891387a-278f-434b-9ff8-791495aaa...

Stratoscope• 1 year ago

https://archive.is/UiNWf

mmooss6• 1 year ago

On one hand, the private competition to match mature, 60 year old technology makes sense. NASA should be focused well out past the bleeding edge.

But being private companies, do they publish their science and research like NASA does? Is development of space tech moving forward in proprietary silos?

Maybe part of goverment funding, which many or all of these projects have, should be publishing the science (if they don't publish it already).

Private Japanese lunar lander enters orbit around moon ahead of a June touchdown

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