Preferences

> China adopted the Surveyor / Apollo-era philosophy. Their first successful lander, Chang'e 3, used the same hover & fall technique as Surveyor.

Dropping the last 4 metres isn't a sign of having a ruggedized, over-speced "takes a lickin' and keeps on kicking' approach". In lunar gravity, you could drop a raw egg from that height and not perturb the chick inside.

Instead the aim is to avoid throwing up too much moon dust with retro rockets.

Luna 9 (1966) really did need to withstand a bit of a bump, but it was 22km/h, comparable with a fast running pace or a car in first gear, not a high speed impact.


echoangle
> Dropping the last 4 metres isn't a sign of having a ruggedized, over-speced "takes a lickin' and keeps on kicking' approach". In lunar gravity, you could drop a raw egg from that height and not perturb the chick inside.

Just for maximum pedantry:

Falling 4 m on the moon is like falling 66 cm or about 2 feet on earth. I don’t know about your eggs but the ones I know wouldn’t survive that.

This item has no comments currently.