At the first days of planning their Moon landing, NASA came out with lithobraking for the times the capsule wouldn’t slow down enough.
Then, some 20 and something years lather, when planing their Mars landers, they decided that no, lithobraking is a perfectly fine thing to do and the landers would use it by design.
I love this sort of thing. Like NASA engineers calling an explosion a “rapid unscheduled disassembly.”
Or a data breach an “emergent distributed backup”
Our data is federated
Or ‘I dunno what was wrong, but banging it helped’ as ‘percussive maintenance’.
At the first days of planning their Moon landing, NASA came out with lithobraking for the times the capsule wouldn’t slow down enough.
Then, some 20 and something years lather, when planing their Mars landers, they decided that no, lithobraking is a perfectly fine thing to do and the landers would use it by design.
So be wary of rocket scientists making jokes.
For anybody like myself who doesn’t know enough ancient greek… Lithos means rock…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithobraking
for the record… the engineering behind that was quite sound.
it’s their ability to use consistent units of measurements that’s in question.
Well that was when they performed lithobraking with a satellite, but they also did lithobraking on purpose for several rover landings