Tuesday, April 25, 2023

Learning to land

The Rosetta mission was good... but could have been great. Lately Hakuto-R1 is having similarly mostly-good results. They share a problem: they didn't stick the landing well. The Apollo term was "brownout" and is akin to the dust kicked up at takeoff.

With that in mind, AIP today discusses some new equations from the Koreans and the Scots. (Stands to reason they'd get along.) This is a model to describe the interaction between a rocket plume and the surface of a planetary body in near-vacuum conditions.

A pity this came too late for this new lander but it does look helpful for the next one. Moon, or Mars.

LANDING PADS 5/15: UniverseToday is studying brownout-mitigation.

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