Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by lorstic 878 days ago
The 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.

2 comments

I 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.

Agreed: Our earth-based intuition is probably pretty off when the atmosphere creates 1% as much friction as it does here.