this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2024
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Science Memes

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Academic language (mander.xyz)
submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 75 points 5 months ago (4 children)

At the first days of planning their Moon landing, NASA came out with lithobraking for the times the capsule wouldn't slow down enough.

Then, some 20 and something years lather, when planing their Mars landers, they decided that no, lithobraking is a perfectly fine thing to do and the landers would use it by design.

So be wary of rocket scientists making jokes.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 5 months ago (1 children)

for the record... the engineering behind that was quite sound.

it's their ability to use consistent units of measurements that's in question.

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

Well that was when they performed lithobraking with a satellite, but they also did lithobraking on purpose for several rover landings

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Yes. And the rover landings worked.

(Technically it was aerobraking on the observer.)

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

For anybody like myself who doesn't know enough ancient greek.. Lithos means rock...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithobraking

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

Well, if there’s no humans on board and the bots can take the impact, why not?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

If you lithobreak into a low gravity object with enough momentum and at an angle you may return into orbit