Why It’s So Challenging to Land Upright on the Moon

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https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/04/science/moon-landing-sideways-gravity.html

By Kenneth Chang, The New York Times. 

Excerpt: When the robotic lander Odysseus last month became the first American-built spacecraft to touch down on the moon in more than 50 years, it toppled over at an angle. ...Just a month earlier, another spacecraft, the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon, or SLIM, sent by the Japanese space agency, had also tipped during landing, ending up on its head. ...people pointed to the height of the Odysseus lander — 14 feet from the bottom of the landing feet to the solar arrays at the top — as a contributing factor for its off-kilter touchdown. ...Philip Metzger, a former NASA engineer who is now a planetary scientist at the University of Central Florida, explained the math and the physics of why it is more difficult to remain standing on the moon. ...“The side motion that can tip a lander of that size is only a few meters per second in lunar gravity.” ...Odysseus was supposed to land vertically with zero horizontal velocity, but because of problems with the navigation system, it was still moving sideways when it hit the ground.... 

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