Sunday, December 15, 2013

HD video of Chang'e-3 descent and landing released


HT: Keith Cowing, NASA Watch, Emily Lakdawalla, The Planetary Society; June Maher, YT.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Looks like the engine did not cut off on touchdown.

Unknown said...

The engine cut off before touchdown. Venting of gases from the engine still produce visible dust though.

Joel Raupe said...

As has been remarked upon elsewhere, the dust kicked up was less, even with cut off at 3 meters, as advertised. The composition of the regolith at this LZ is quite different than has been observed elsewhere, relatively thin regolith depth in relation to bedrock, which meant smaller craters could excavate- though this last probably didn't relate to the dust issue. It will be interesting if LADEE see any spike at all...