Of interest
https://phys.org/news/2025-06-glass-nanostructures-visible-photonics-assumptions.amp

I was thinking about unilluminable rooms…that looks like a zig-zag of a sort…reflective bits could direct light down to be absorbed by darker grains.

….to quote Andrew Wiles–“I think I’ll stop now.”

Could be one, could be two, it could be all five!

Looks like their corrective actions for landers 3 and 4, they will be using multiple sensors (LiDARs), a camera, and RADAR.

Looked like a tommy gun.

The chief offender is Volvo’s 1550nm LiDAR that seems to fry CMOS sensors. Eye safe, however–or so the claim is.

Windroid has footage..search for “LiDAR sensor will fry your phone’s camera!”

I can’t get *this* phone to link for crap.

That lidar vs. cell phones thing sounds like a “new wive’s tale” so to speak. Any lidar powerful enough to mess with cell phone cameras would probably toast your retinas first and that much power is never going to be allowed on roads.

More to the point, the vast majority of self-driving cars, for the foreseeable future, are going to be Teslas which don’t have lidars at all.

The only self-driving cars that do have them, at this point, are those Waymo monstrosities. They cost at least $150K each to build, the driverless rides cost more than calling a Lyft or an Uber and their “autonomy” software is notably inferior to Tesla FSD. The Waymos are also pretty tightly geofenced. I don’t think they’re long for this world – and not just because anti-ICE “protesters” seem to have taken a fancy to setting them on fire.

So not to worry.

As to lidars, “laser range finders” and Moon landers, you could well be right about regolith interactions being the issue, though I’d bet more on too much absorption than on too much reflection.

Doubting Thomas,

The old ways are sometimes still useful and not to be discarded just because there is a newer way. At least not until the new way has been well bug-chased and wrung out. But one of those “old ways” was throwing entire rockets away after launching them. That is one old way we’re well rid of.

Jay,

More good questions. My best wishes on finding answers. Please share if you do.

I was curious where this LRF (Laser Range Finder) was and if there was more than one. Not many English diagrams out there, all I could find is this one of Resilience. Unfortunately this diagram only gives general information.

I bet your correct.

Are they even testing this whole system in a vacuum chamber with sim rigolith.?

The old ways are the best ways.

All very on-point questions. More stuff I won’t find out by not watching the presser – and probably would not find out even if I did watch.

The radar suggestion is a good one given that that’s all the Apollo LMs had aboard and all they seemed to need.

Edward KK: The added cost isn’t just adding the new equipment (which is not a trivial act). It also includes the cost of this investigation and the creation of a task force that includes other outside players. Those players have to be paid for their work.

$11 million is actually a very small number, compared to the overages routinely seen in government-run planetary projects.

Why would LIDAR add another 11 million? Some basic LIDAR hardware options can’t cost more than a few thousand for earth bound tools. Obviously we need that to be hardened for space use, so let’s multiply that cost by a thousand. That gives us 1-2 million . Then we need coding, testing, etc. I struggle to see this costing more than $5.

Of course govts are involved.. so I should just shut up. :)