This really is a very high quality forum in terms of signal-to-noise ratio, with a real emphasise on discussing actual science. For that alone it should be sorely missed - the world needs more such discussions, and more of the attitude that leads to them, not less. For myself personally: I have learned so very much from reading the content here, and have had the chance to talk with people working on the projects which I otherwise only know from space news websites. It's given me a chance to engage with exploring the solar system in a way I probably wouldn't other wise have gotten. I earned my PhD while a member here, via a good many long nights sat up starting at either a vacuum chamber or a spreadsheet of results, and this place and the people I could speak with here, waiting in a tab down near the bottom of the screen, helped me to keep that passion for real investigation going. It is an internet forum that has actually been credited (along with many of its members) in real papers on planetary science - so I can say with evidence behind me that it really rose far above even the best expectations for a science forum.
As Doug says: Better to be happy to have been a part of it than sad it's ending. Thank you Doug, Nick, Emily and all the team.

See you all out there I hope,

Marsbug AKA Dr John Freeman

Per multiple fairly reliable interested social media accounts (including AMSAT -DL who are actively tracking the signal themselves) and following updates over on NASASpaceflight : A weak signal has been received from the lander on the surface. There was an 8 degree roll excursion towards the end of the EDL. Palms up I am only guessing, but wonder if the roll in question was one to get the lander in the right orientation for landing - in which case the antenna's pointing might be off, perhaps accounting for the weak signal (this is Scott Manley's suggestion).
Not perfect perhaps, but promising.

Having read the above reminder of rule 1.9 I should probably be clear that I am asking because I'm interested in the technology of the LEV-2 mini rover and where it might go from here: My own searching has thrown up precious little on the specifics of the LEV-2 cameras, and how they are oriented and operate - except that control board for them was designed with maximum energy efficiency in mind, by Sony. Does anyone have any directions or links to a more detailed break-down of them? EDIT: I'm aware that the rover was made by TOMY, a toy manufacturer, but I've not found anything in the way of technical material on their website.

While it looks like things have not gone flawlessly, JAXA has an at-least-partly-functional vehicle on the Lunar surface. So I think it's time to say 'well done JAXA and the SLIM team'. At lot of smart and determined folks have tried this and ended up as a crater to be imaged by LRO.

As per here: <a href="https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html" target="_blank">https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn</a> There is definitely a signal from the lander, which at least rules out it having smacked into the regolith at tens of meters a second.

Jeff Foust reports that nine of the payloads are powered, and data is being collected - relating to how they operate in the space environment, not regarding the Moon, obviously - but that's still valuable for the payload teams. Article here: <a href="https://spacenews.com/astrobotic-gets-payloads-working-on-ailing-peregrine-lander/" target="_blank">https://spacenews.com/astrobotic-gets-paylo...regrine-lander/</a>

Happy 20th landing anniversary to the rover and her team. May there be boots to pay their respects on site asap.

As ever: Thanks for doing this Phil!

Well done ISRO!

One of my favourite things about the place is the simplicity of layout. I think there's a good (and hard won) sense of accessibility of threads on any given topics, without losing how complex those topics are when you dig into them. Good luck to the admin team and staff, I know from experience that projects like this involve a lot of hunting down bugs, I appreciate the effort!

Definitely a possibility - though I wish they wouldn't: A mission across the inner solar system to (partially) restore Spitzer is impressive enough even if it is just a relay. At uni I took part in launching a weather balloon to 20 km, measuring the air pressure and sending a 'here I am' signal, and was plenty impressed: Clearly I am not the target audience of their PR!

Actually I've been wondering about this: There articles my own algorithms have sent me have been light on details, but one quote that caught my eye:

From here: https://phys.org/news/2023-05-nasa-resurrec...-telescope.html

It definitely confirms it won't dock or load He, but "most complex robotic mission ever attempted by humanity" doesn't sound like it's just going to loiter and at as a relay....

My apologies for the thread necromancy, but it seems that this paper and any debate on it fits exactly:

Modern water at low latitudes on Mars: Potential evidence from dune surfaces

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.add8868

About 17 meter/sec impact velocity, discounting any residual from the descent. Ouch. Edit: The reported (tentatively) rate of drop at 90 meters was 33 km/hour, or about 9 meters a second. So we could be looking at over 26 meters a second on impact - still, well done to the team for getting to 90 meters of the lunar surface and for the hard landing (it's still a landing on the moon!) and all the data returned up to that point. Roll on mission 2!

I am slightly reminded of Philae landing on comet 67P - just slightly. Which is annoying because I don't think it's reasonable, at this point, to hope for any more contact from the lander. However I am still holding out hope that we'll eventually get evidence of the lander being intact, and perhaps (as per Phil Stooke's post above) that it did manage top soft land, but something went wrong afterwards - if that proved to be the case, would this still count as a successful soft landing I wonder? Though that is kinda a semantic discussion, so maybe not appropriate here.

Seconded - well done to the team! I'm still expecting that it will be down in one piece, just a bit too hard to work as planned.

From the spacenews feed.

On the spacenews feed it mentions that, tentatively, at 90 meters the lander was dropping at 33 km/ hour. The previous numbers were 54km/hour at 180 meters altitude. OK... this is little better than reading entrail I realise, but if, for the sake of argument, we take these as more-or-less accurate the lander would have reached 0 meters with a velocity of just under 2 meters/sec.

This makes no account of whether the numbers are just vertical drop rate or overall velocity, or angle of descent. I just wanted to illustrate that they ispace team may not have been too far off the mark with their landing.

I'm keeping everything crossed. The last confirmed velocity was 54km / hour, which is about 15 meters / second. How much chance there still was to get that down from the 0.18 km altitude depends on the angle of attack - but it must have all played out fast.

Thank you for the updates and detective work Phil Stooke!

They're there, but well hidden! Go to the block schedule, scroll down until you hit the blue colored blocks representing the oral sessions. Click the title link for the oral session. At the bottom of the session page in teeny writing are the titles of the presentations. Click on the titles to get to the presentation page. There's a blue link at the bottom that opens the abstract in a new window.

Hey all, I haven't seen this paper by JAXA's Stone Analysis Team mentioned, so I thought I'd share it - it's an interesting summary of their investigation & findings so far: Press release link (free) https://global.jaxa.jp/press/2022/09/20220923-1_e.html

Paper link (pay to view) https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abn8671

Looking at this picture: https://www.asi.it/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/6.png
The asteroid regolith is fairly dark material, but Didymos is quite over exposed. At the same time the streamers and debris, while widespread, are still barely visible, with no really bright spots except the one where the mini-moon itself is located. So the streamers are not dense, and don't have any larger chunks in (unless Dimorphos has a pure carbon interior), but the point where the mini moon sits is still bright - which suggests the moon itself is still dense and reflective compared to the streamers, and likely most of it is still in one place.

Ah, I did wonder about that, thank you.

Someone basically reporting what activity had been planned before the relay satellite's reaction wheel issue came up?