<story><title>Japan&apos;s precision moon lander has hit its target, but appears to be upside-down</title><url>https://phys.org/news/2024-01-japan-craft-successful-pin-moon.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>smeej</author><text>&amp;gt; For the pinpoint landing, Sakai said, he would give SLIM a &amp;quot;perfect score.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I get being really, really proud of what you accomplished here, but...&lt;i&gt;perfect&lt;/i&gt;? Really? You can&amp;#x27;t think of anything that maybe could have gone better?&lt;p&gt;I know it&amp;#x27;s a much more sophisticated problem than this, but my inner child thinks they just forgot &amp;quot;the planet(oid) has to be &amp;#x27;down&amp;#x27; on both ends of the trajectory.&amp;quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>makeitdouble</author><text>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.&lt;p&gt;On the context of the &amp;quot;perfect score&amp;quot;, 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.&lt;p&gt;The speaker made the point that achieving that much of precision is just ground breaking and will completely change how we frame the &amp;quot;where do we land&amp;quot; question  from now on,so giving it a perfect score is I think legit.</text></comment>
<story><title>Japan&apos;s precision moon lander has hit its target, but appears to be upside-down</title><url>https://phys.org/news/2024-01-japan-craft-successful-pin-moon.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>smeej</author><text>&amp;gt; For the pinpoint landing, Sakai said, he would give SLIM a &amp;quot;perfect score.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I get being really, really proud of what you accomplished here, but...&lt;i&gt;perfect&lt;/i&gt;? Really? You can&amp;#x27;t think of anything that maybe could have gone better?&lt;p&gt;I know it&amp;#x27;s a much more sophisticated problem than this, but my inner child thinks they just forgot &amp;quot;the planet(oid) has to be &amp;#x27;down&amp;#x27; on both ends of the trajectory.&amp;quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>csa</author><text>&amp;gt; but...perfect? Really? You can&amp;#x27;t think of anything that maybe could have gone better?&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;From the the article,
emphasis mine:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; For the &lt;i&gt;pinpoint&lt;/i&gt; landing, Sakai said, he would give SLIM a &amp;quot;perfect score.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &amp;quot;We demonstrated that we can land where we want,&amp;quot; Sakai said. &amp;quot;We opened a door to a new era.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;I don’t think anyone is disillusioned enough to think the overall landing was perfect.</text></comment>