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I just realized I don't know how Starship, or the Falcons for that matter, "know" their position prior to landing. Orientation, I expect, would be determined b
by crispyambulance 6y ago
I just realized I don't know how Starship, or the Falcons for that matter, "know" their position prior to landing.
Orientation, I expect, would be determined by some kind of gyro (ring laser gyro? or super precise accelerometer?). How about altitude? What is the feedback mechanism(s) to know where the ground is in the moment before touch down?
- aphextron 6y ago>What is the feedback mechanism(s) to know where the ground is in the moment before touch down? Radar
- Symmetry 6y agoI'd imagine a wide variety of inputs sources are all being fed into a Kalman filter or something similar. Certainly they're going to be using gyros but also radar, GPS, and probably other things.
- bdamm 6y agoIn addition to radar, gps, gyro.. they likely also have terminal guidance radio very similar to what airports use for guiding airplanes to the runway in fog/cloud. See Instrument Landing System. They may use active radar reflectors, and if they do, I'd say that's a different form of the same basic idea (using fixed radio sources to calculate an expected landing position.)