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All good points. The solutions for Mars will necessarily be unique to that environment. Still, a combination of ground stations and satellites will be inevitabl
by JoeAltmaier 2y ago
All good points.
The solutions for Mars will necessarily be unique to that environment. Still, a combination of ground stations and satellites will be inevitably used for location-finding.
And, the atmosphere? What atmosphere? It's negligible compared to Earth. Got to be down the list of important variables.
We can send a mission to Mars and arrive within a few meters of desired orbit, but it's going to be hard to figure out where a satellite is? My doubt-meter is hitting the pin.
- mandevil 2y agoAtmospheric drag on satellites- especially how it changes with solar output levels- is a hard thing to model accurately, and a major contributor to orbital uncertainty here on Earth. The Martian atmosphere is two orders of magnitude thinner, but it is far less than two orders of magnitude understood. And the level of our understanding matters for our ability to correct for it's perturbations. NASA is very good at sending spacecraft through regular space and hitting precise windows (MCO units issues aside), it's in orbit that things get more complicated, because now there are just a lot more potential interactions to deal with. We can use LOS on planetary occultations to give you some data, but it's still a lot of work to get from there to mascon maps, upper atmospheric data, etc.