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Landers don't impact hard - they fire rocket engines down, which may be much more efficient at kicking up dust than an impact.

(I still think this is overblowing the problem, because any lander that causes this big of an ejecta problem would also badly damage itself. All the designs will put a LOT of engineering work into minimizing debris, eg Starship putting separate landing engines high up on the vehicle.)




> because any lander that causes this big of an ejecta problem would also badly damage itself

Not necessarily because the relative speeds will be very slow. Not so in low lunar orbit, where an orbiting spacecraft will slam into the ejecta curtain at >1 km/s.


The paper estimates that if there's LLO debris, it'll be starting out with about 1.6km/s of surface-relative velocity. Not something you want to get even a small percentage of on your landing gear.


My first time encountering this acronym. I can't wait until it's in common use and we have cities and communication satellites in and around the moon.


I guess you really like 1950s sci-fi.


Oh, that's a good point.


The ejecta would go out to the side and not harm the lander. I'm just amazed that the ejecta is being thrown hard enough to be a threat at orbital altitude.


It’s a combination of the moon’s orbital velocity being low and the exhaust velocity being high.


I'm still surprised that it can impart that much velocity, though.


Well is it not intuitive that something being blown by a moving fluid approaches speeds equal to the speed of the fluid?


That's a simplifying assumption (per the paper). In reality it would be a distribution, with a lot less going up than to the sides.

Plus then you're dealing with damage to your hopefully-smooth landing site.


That doesn't bode super well for Blue Origin's lander then, since its engines are on the bottom.


They're not going to get far without some other method of reducing ejecta, doing so is in the NASA requirements.


yet they've just been awarded a tender for HLS


Which means NASA is satisfied that they have some other solution




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