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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.

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FuglyDuck@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
for the record… the engineering behind that was quite sound.

it’s their ability to use consistent units of measurements that’s in question.

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- Strykker@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Well that was when they performed lithobraking with a satellite, but they also did lithobraking on purpose for several rover landings
  
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  - FuglyDuck@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Yes. And the rover landings worked.
    
    (Technically it was aerobraking on the observer.)
    
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Trashcan@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
For anybody like mine who doesn’t know enough ancient greek… Lithos means rock…

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithobraking

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Mongostein@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Well, if there’s no humans on board and the bots can take the impact, why not?

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Natanael@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
If you lithobreak into a low gravity object with enough momentum and at an angle you may return into orbit

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