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That doesn’t really make sense. It wouldn’t necessarily or even likely have crashed at its destination as it should have returned to base once it reached those
by stult 5y ago
That doesn’t really make sense. It wouldn’t necessarily or even likely have crashed at its destination as it should have returned to base once it reached those coordinates and completed its mission. And even if it were programmed to loiter until it was out of fuel (which… why?), the drones are supposed to land with a parachute so it wouldn’t have just crashed and exploded. The name coincidence is only interesting if you assume it crashed in a specific place of interest as opposed to randomly along its course. It’s much more likely and common for someone to fat finger in coordinates with a small, random error like flipping a sign or swapping digits. Flipping the sign on latitude or longitude fools the drone’s GNC system into targeting a destination that is on the opposite side of the planet and the system just flies in a straight line in that direction until it runs out of fuel. It’s the same failure mode as googling the wrong coordinates but a more commonly occurring category of user error.
- mstipetic 5y agoIt did deploy parachutes. It’s almost exactly 1000 km away which is the range of the drone. There was no explosion so they assume it ran out of fuel. Keep in mind this is 1970s tech, not some advanced ai drone. The chances of hitting a city instead of some countryside are pretty slim.