A Landing at Last

When I checked the Astronomy Picture of the Day yesterday morning, I saw an image from a probe approaching the moon. One of my first thoughts was that I must not be keeping up with space missions as well as I could to be sort of surprised at the impending landing, even if the probe had taken a lot longer to approach the moon than the “three days” I’m familiar with. (If someone was to explain a longer coast out means a given rocket can deliver more mass to the moon, I suppose I’d accept that.) I was also thinking, though, of a number of other recent moon probes that didn’t manage soft (or at least upright) landings.

Even if I’d missed or forgotten initial news of the mission, I did at least see an announcement the next morning in my RSS reader, and it was a report of a successful touchdown. Still uncertain about what might happen afterwards I managed to look up an official mission site, and one of the pictures there included the shadow of a probe standing on its landing legs. With apparent proof one of these new-type missions has worked out at last, I went on to ponder the suggestion it’s only supposed to work through the lunar day and not last out the fourteen Earth days of a frigid lunar night.