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

212•pseudolus•9mo ago

Comments

ionwake•9mo 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•9mo ago

Nope, a coincidence. We are extremely lucky

ionwake•9mo ago

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

dmurray•9mo 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.

ionwake•9mo 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

fc417fc802•9mo ago

This is nonsense. You don't need to observe the entire edge of the sun's disk to observe gravitational lensing. A partial view would work just as well.

> I used chatgpt i ahve no idea wat it means

Please don't do that. You're just filling the comment section with misleading noise.

ionwake•9mo ago

You are right in that I should not have been light hearted about using chatgpt, but it isn't noise , it is a rebuttal to your point that the size of the moon can be larger without it affecting the number of mass coronal ejections which can be studied, which is wrong.

You then changed your assertion for some odd reason (Ignoratio elenchi) have half through the discussion.

Weirdest thing is, I only typed out my comments to try and help you learn something new which is pretty ungrateful on your side, You also seemingly downvoted me too. A simple thanks man I didnt know that would of sufficed.

Quick go make another new throwaway account.

ck2•9mo 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•9mo ago

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

an0malous•9mo 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?

ck2•9mo ago

It's somewhat of a demonstration/argument of the anthropic principle

Because we're here and that appears to be a "special case" and rare and no other life spotted (yet) elsewhere, it might very well be the reason we are here at all (that we haven't figured out yet)

It certainly enabled math and science to progress because it was accidentally possible to calculate distances because of that size/distance particularity even before telescopes and computers, though I realize that's not biological evolution

ionwake•9mo ago

fascinating, you made me dig further. Apparently the existence of the moon allowed:

Ancient Past, Navigation, Tidal patterns enabled early coastal navigation and fishing patterns, critical for survival; Prehistory, Evolution of Life, Stabilization of Earth's axial tilt led to climate stability, promoting diverse ecosystems; Early Civilization, Timekeeping, Regular lunar cycles allowed ancient societies to develop lunar calendars and plan agriculture; Ancient Astronomy, Observing Celestial Events, Solar eclipses (due to perfect alignment) inspired early understanding of the cosmos; Future, Gravitational Lensing Studies, Its size and distance offer a natural model to study lensing phenomena and gravitational effects; Far Future, Space Colonization, Potential base for observing the universe free from Earth's atmospheric interference.

mmooss•9mo 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?'

an0malous•9mo ago

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

eddyg•9mo ago

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

ionwake•9mo ago

thx man right up my alley for a read between coding sprints, r u on twitter? we seem to share lunar fascination

rssoconnor•9mo 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.

an0malous•9mo ago

Temporary on the scale of 600 million years or more

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

jfengel•9mo 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.

sdeframond•9mo 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.

ionwake•9mo ago

It is in context of things which are not rare. For example the number of blondes at a beach party in Italy, which has a large brunette poopulation.

sdeframond•9mo ago

Imagine an all-blonde beach party in Siciliy. Pretty rare right?

So is a beach party where everyone is tall, or short, or has the same name, or a beach party during which there's an earthquake, a meteor etc etc.

All would be rare events, but there are so many rare events that could possibly happen that is is not that rare to witness something rare, especially if we are looking for that.

Therefore witnessing a rare event may not mean much.

This is related to p-hacking https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_dredging

yieldcrv•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo 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.

fc417fc802•9mo ago

This is approximately a description of the GNS pet name system. Also DOIs for scientific articles.

notahacker•9mo 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

tmtvl•9mo ago

Don't forget Spacey McSpaceface.

varjag•9mo 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.

jfengel•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo ago

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

wafflemaker•9mo ago

But AFAIK, Cisco IOS is all caps, not the cool lowercase i and big second letter.

akovaski•9mo 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•9mo ago

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

dmix•9mo ago

The company started in 2010

mmooss•9mo ago

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

eabeezxjc•9mo 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

jfengel•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo ago

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

Is there a list of programs available?

myself248•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo ago

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

tmtvl•9mo ago

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

SoftTalker•9mo ago

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

mmooss•9mo ago

Then you'd have a lot more cars stopping in front of you. Next time you pass a bus, look at all the people inside, and then imagine each of them, on the same block, in their private cars.

Dylan16807•9mo ago

And even without that effect, okay you remove 2% of traffic, the driving experience is pretty much the same even without anyone being directly behind a bus.

charcircuit•9mo ago

>on the same block

Except in reality this wouldn't be the case if people didn't use the bus.

mmooss•9mo ago

No? What would be the case? Based on what?

One explicit, primary goal of public transit is to move lots of people around in the limited space on a city street.

charcircuit•9mo ago

Based on the fact that cars are not linked together like a train. Cars can go different routes from one another and can go to different destinations. This spreads them out more over them all being in the same place.

mmooss•9mo ago

So some people on the bus in front of you would drive cars on other streets, and some people on buses on other streets will drive cars on your street; there's no reason your street will have a net benefit.

That's especially true because there will be far more cars on the road.

XorNot•9mo ago

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

cybernoodles•9mo ago

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

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

Stratoscope•9mo ago

https://archive.is/UiNWf

mmooss•9mo 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).

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

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