The navigational issues started after Odysseus conducted a planned maneuver called lunar orbital insertion on Wednesday night, which put it in an elliptical orbit around the moon. That ended up being extremely “fortuitous,” Altemus said, because it led mission controllers to try to use a navigational subsystem called “laser rangefinders” far earlier than planned (the lasers were going to be activated for the first time during the final descent phase).
After reviewing the data, the company realized the morning of landing that the lasers were not working — because they did not turn off a physical safety switch on the component while it was still on the ground.
And then they happened to have the NASA LIDAR package they could use as back up. And then the lander tipped over, but not on the side with the important equipment on it. Good lord they were lucky.
And EagleCam was not deployed at landing due to complications of the LIDAR software change, so instead of releasing EagleCam and not seeing the landing (due to the unexpected lateral movement), they can use the camera to confirm the status of the lander. So lucky.
so they cross strapped a payload laser sensor to use for attitude/ranging control because the laser range finders didn't remove its hardware interlock?
I’m amazed they had performance data of the LIDAR package useful for calibrating into attitude and range finding processing? And they updated the software in a few hours to use that new data into the navigation models? That is crackerjack software programming; I would guess it’s a higher level language onboard than ada to allow such rapid prototyping and deployment?
I bet that they had it already developed and validated and just needed to enable it, either by flicking a config or updating to a different build with the other lidar enabled.
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And then they happened to have the NASA LIDAR package they could use as back up. And then the lander tipped over, but not on the side with the important equipment on it. Good lord they were lucky.
And EagleCam was not deployed at landing due to complications of the LIDAR software change, so instead of releasing EagleCam and not seeing the landing (due to the unexpected lateral movement), they can use the camera to confirm the status of the lander. So lucky.
so they cross strapped a payload laser sensor to use for attitude/ranging control because the laser range finders didn't remove its hardware interlock?
I’m amazed they had performance data of the LIDAR package useful for calibrating into attitude and range finding processing? And they updated the software in a few hours to use that new data into the navigation models? That is crackerjack software programming; I would guess it’s a higher level language onboard than ada to allow such rapid prototyping and deployment?
I bet that they had it already developed and validated and just needed to enable it, either by flicking a config or updating to a different build with the other lidar enabled.