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New Horizons is fastest chemical rocket taking 78 days to cross Mars orbit. (You'd use a different, longer path for Mars orbital/lander insertion.) New Horizons
by peter303 11y ago
New Horizons is fastest chemical rocket taking 78 days to cross Mars orbit. (You'd use a different, longer path for Mars orbital/lander insertion.)
New Horizons crossed lunar orbit in 9 hours, or about six times faster than Apollo flights.
- owenversteeg 11y agoSure, but my points in the article only really apply once you change the velocity in a significant way. ke=mv^2, so going 100 times faster means ten thousand times the KE and thus ten thousand times the destruction. For an example, New Horizons was at Mars around 13km/s. At 13km/s, the impact of that microscopic object, instead of being one hundred million bullets, is now 169 joules, barely a tenth of a bullet's energy. Still harmful, but with New Horizons being car-sized, slower moving, and armored, that repeated tenth-of-a-bullet impact is a problem that can be dealt with.