> For the pinpoint landing, Sakai said, he would give SLIM a "perfect score."
I get being really, really proud of what you accomplished here, but...perfect? Really? You can't think of anything that maybe could have gone better?
I know it's a much more sophisticated problem than this, but my inner child thinks they just forgot "the planet(oid) has to be 'down' on both ends of the trajectory."
Other commentors are already pointing out how we went from kilometers of precision to a target of under 100m for this mission. But in practice, the team is confident it landed within 10m, which is pretty darn good.
On the context of the "perfect score", they initially gave themselves a 60 out of 100 score during their first press conference after the landing, and today a member of the audience explicitely asked them to revise that score knowing what we know now.
The speaker made the point that achieving that much of precision is just ground breaking and will completely change how we frame the "where do we land" question from now on,so giving it a perfect score is I think legit.
> but...perfect? Really? You can't think of anything that maybe could have gone better?
The context of the comment in the article referred to the “pinpoint landing” aspect of the landing. They narrowed down the landing range from 10,000m (10k) to 100m… two orders of magnitude.
From the the article,
emphasis mine:
> For the pinpoint landing, Sakai said, he would give SLIM a "perfect score."
> "We demonstrated that we can land where we want," Sakai said. "We opened a door to a new era."
I don’t know if this comment was made in English or Japanese, but I could see how a very specific comment about the pinpoint aspect of the landing in Japanese could be vague when translated into English.
I don’t think anyone is disillusioned enough to think the overall landing was perfect.
I think I was including "landing" in the relevant part of "pinpoint landing," not just the pinpoint element, which was what made it amusing. It did (apparently) "land" and not "crash" (or at least that's what I'm assuming from the fact that it isn't crushed/doesn't look like it made primary impact on some part that was not intended for impact), but "landing and falling over" doesn't normally earns a perfect score in any other common context.
I work in the industry and "pinpoint landing" refers to the accuracy part. If he was talking about landing in general, the sentence would be something like "the landing didn't go as expected, but we achieved a pinpoint landing".
I'm far from a translator... but it is not "We opened a door" but "A door is open to do missions that were not possible before". And he says that might be the most important takeaway from this project.
> I'm far from a translator... but it is not "We opened a door" but "A door is open to do missions that were not possible before".
You're being overly literal. Omitting the subject is normal in Japanese; translating that to a passive-voiced sentence in English is usually misleading.
Again, not a distinction that carries the same nuance that it would in English. The whole animate/inanimate distinction just isn't there in the same way in non-indo-european languages.
が makes the subject the door, not JAXA. Plus it would be very uncharacteristic of a Japanese person in that position making such a bold claim. It goes against Japanese society norms.
>Opening a new door in many senses (or "in different ways" if you want to take some liberty), from now on, missions that couldn't be done until now will become possible. Isn't it the most important (thing)?
It's possible that the "minimum success criteria" or "primary objective" of the mission was to touch down intact within a radius. If that was achieved, then I think even in English it is reasonable to call the landing "perfect" in that it achieved all of the mission goals.
But that all depends on whether, "land upright and measure things with the expensive instruments we sent it with" was originally included as a primary objective and whether they've just moved the goal posts to minimize the appearance of the failure.
We seem to be losing the definition of words. From "perfect phone calls" to "perfect landings" just feels like moving the goal posts. Let's tone down the rhetoric a bit. A very successful landing. sure. Met all of the necessary goals even if wasn't as designed. sure. Perfect landing. Let's not be silly
I can see talking yourself into that definition, but any 4-year-old can look at that picture and tell you it didn't land perfectly. "No, silly! It's upsidedown!"
As a comparator for the pinpoint landing, the 1969 Apollo 12 landed within walking distance (535 ft) of the Surveyor 3 probe (which had landed two years earlier). It did have a human pilot who flew the descent and managed terrain avoidance.
You could engineer-ize that kind of problem. Maybe they plugged it into a complicated optimization package (want to minimize stresses from the landing) but forgot to add a crucial orientation related constraint…
Probably, almost certainly, that isn’t what happened. But it could!
FWIW, ISAS Director General(the "faculty" president, also a PM in another probe in the past) Hitoshi Kuninaka scored it at 63 points, with 60 for the landing and bonus 1 point each for scientific camera and two payload probes, you could say he's more based or whatever.
OTOH, in defense of the PM, the lander showed exceptional robustness against loss of an engine, so he'd have a reason to be proud of an explosionless landing.
Oh definitely not saying they shouldn't be proud. I'm intensely impressed, and they should be extremely proud.
It was just the juxtaposition of "perfect" with the picture of the thing upsidedown that made me laugh. "Near-perfect" I'll happily grant. Same with "impressive as all get-out." But "perfect" made me chuckle.
the main point seems to have been the precision with which they could land within a small region, and they did nail that. fta:
While most previous probes have used landing zones about 10 kilometers (six miles) wide, SLIM was aiming at a target of just 100 meters (330 feet). Improved accuracy would give scientists access to more of the moon, since probes could be placed nearer to obstacles.
The patient is alive. The lander still functioned on batteries. The solar panels are facing the wrong way, but they hope that the panels will produce power when the angle of the sun changes.
I cant help but think the Japanophile contingent on HN are super eager to grade-inflate anything and everything remotely applause-worthy Japan related in general.
I get being really, really proud of what you accomplished here, but...perfect? Really? You can't think of anything that maybe could have gone better?
I know it's a much more sophisticated problem than this, but my inner child thinks they just forgot "the planet(oid) has to be 'down' on both ends of the trajectory."