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Sped up footage from Chang'e 6 lander descent (media.mas.to)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/16378924

Sped up footage from Chang'e 6 lander descent

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Damn, that just feels surreal to me. I can't properly conceptualize the scale of the moon I guess

[–] [email protected] 20 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Moon has fractal like surface. Big craters look like small craters and small craters look like big craters.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago

Yup. There are no human-scale objects as a reference.

There are a few landers, yes, but if you tried to use them to gauge distance to the surface, they're so small that by the time you pick them out, it's probably too late to decelerate properly.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago

Before Apollo 11, nasa spent a lot of time getting astronauts to try to navigate to a simulated lander out in the desert. They used explosives to make a scale version of a lunar field, dropped astronauts off, and had them try to navigate to the lander.

If I remember right, only a couple people were able to even identify where they were on the map, let alone find the lander again. Lunar surfaces are just so unnatural that human instincts about size and scale tend to get you in more trouble than not.