6 ms·
It's nearly a kilometer from the rover, should be fine. But I agree that it's better to leave it, download the remaining images and data from memory, maybe lea
by LeifCarrotson 3y ago
It's nearly a kilometer from the rover, should be fine.
But I agree that it's better to leave it, download the remaining images and data from memory, maybe leave the software running as an experiment in non-rad-hardened computers on the surface, and eventually put it in a museum, than risk it crashing in spectacular fashion.
- lorstic 3y agoThe tips of the rotors approach the speed of sound. Around Mach 0.95. I'm sure someone can do the math on the maximum debris field, but I think it'll be larger than you're thinking.
- LeifCarrotson 3y agoI doubt the debris field would be 1km in size. Assume you throw a high-speed small piece of propeller tip debris at the optimal angle at 240 m/s or about 800 fps. I'm sure it goes farther in lower Martian gravity and atmosphere but a spinning lead air rifle pellet at that speed and the optimal high-arc trajectory could barely make it half that far on Earth. None of the ballistics tables have columns for Martian atmosphere or gravity. (Yet! I hope I live to see a day when we could use this information, but not quite as much as I hope that we never have to use this in anger.) But even in the worst case, you're scattering a 1.8 kilogram robot (more accurately, a few grams of the rotor blades) over an area of pi square kilometers. The chance that a large chunk hits Perseverance just wrong is negligible.
- dgacmu 3y agoAgreed: Our earth-based intuition is probably pretty off when the atmosphere creates 1% as much friction as it does here.