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."
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.
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.
> いろんな意味で新しい扉が開き、今後、これまでできなかったようなミッションができるようになるのでは。そこが一番の意義ではないか
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.
https://news.yahoo.co.jp/articles/08a8bfdd7a41486140a97a8570...
You're being overly literal. Omitting the subject is normal in Japanese; translating that to a passive-voiced sentence in English is usually misleading.
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.
Translation for those wondering.
Chuck Yeager
But the passenger payloads deployed correctly, so we'll count that as walking away.
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_12#Lunar_orbit_and_Moon...
Probably, almost certainly, that isn’t what happened. But it could!
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.
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.
S rank! Play next time for SSS!
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 problem may have been in their metrics. The KPI should have been a successful landing for the full range of 'successful'.