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How realistic is a dry run via an earth simulation from high aptitude to make sure units are sane?
by cordite 10y ago
How realistic is a dry run via an earth simulation from high aptitude to make sure units are sane?
- hguant 10y agoGiven that Mar's atmosphere masses about 25 terratonnes compared to Earth's 5148 terratonnes, and Mar's atmospheric pressure is about 1% that of Earth's sea level, you'd need to do high altitude testing at about 30 miles up, which is about 5 Mount Everests. Much simpler to test fire the engines in a lab somewhere to make sure they run, and test the software in a simulation of the landing. It'll probably come out in the next year or so that there was either just a flat error in the code, or that the simulation was incorrect in some way.