16 thoughts on “Odysseus”

  1. Why isn’t CG height more of a design consideration for such landers? So many lander designs I have noticed are tall and slender rather than short and fat.

    1. I am wondering the same. Did no one give consideration to the layout of the Surveyor spacecraft from the 1960s?

    2. You’re exactly right! Some of the experienced people I work with immediately diagnosed the problem after touch down. Weak signal = bad antenna pointing = tipped over due to high CG in low gravity.

      Probably they didn’t damp all the landing energy. It sprung off the surface with a small rotation rate. Hang time in low gravity is a few seconds so it doesn’t take much of a rate to turn it 45 to 90 degrees and it comes down on it’s side.

      It would’ve been smarter to design it with very low CG, e.g. Insight Mars lander. Plus damp all landing energy!

  2. Hmmm, can’t be too wide or won’t be able to fit in a payload shroud. I see a couple of other possibilities. Height might help with communication and solar energy collection. And there might be reasons to keep the rest of the craft further away from the braking rocket.

    1. Yeah, you only have so much width to work with. So if you need more things, you either have a tall lander (with a high CG) or you have a mechanism to expand the width (which is another failure point and also adds mass).

    2. The leg span was maximum for fixed gear, but the rest of it could have been wider and shorter.
      It also doesn’t seem like it would be a big deal to build a gear that deploys to a wider stance, if necessary. Wouldn’t have to be powered, just spring-loaded to an over-center position when released perhaps?
      But I’m sure the IM engineers had good reason for their choices.

  3. I agree that this mission should be considered a success. And as always, follow-missions can, at a minimum, learn to avoid another failure mode.

    That said, after the Starship fleet is able to make regional landings and discharge many rover copies driving long distances in every direction, will these CLPS landers find any “commercial” customers? How strong is their commercial business case?

    1. I think we should have a large amount of robotic missions to Mars. One bring a lot robotic mission on Starship, but for exploration, you want robotic mission all over the Mars surface.
      I think you also want a lot crew bases on Mars. You start base easiest to get to, then build more bases say 1/2 dozen of them, but could have dozens different places you would put robotic missions.

  4. A 12% slope is 50% steeper than a wheelchair ramp. That seems to get overlooked a lot. It would take a very low center of gravity to survive landing on that with any downhill horizontal velocity.

    I have worked schedule pressure (concrete) jobs where one missing nail in a brace creates a problem. Critics focus on that nail ignore that thousands of nails and other details done right in a minus sleep situation.

  5. The lander also still had a decent amount of vertical velocity (~3/ms) and also horizontal velocity at touchdown — reports say ~1 meter/second. I’ve not heard what relation that velocity is to the 12% slope. Landing at a perpendicular angle to the slope would be different from landing going downhill.

  6. I’d like to point out that there is a middle ground between “crash” and “landing.” It’s called a “crash landing” and that pretty describes this. It seems a bit disingenuous to call it a success.

    1. Your comment remind me of a now politically impossible comedy skit which I will paraphrase thus:

      Announcer: So I see you are carrying some headgear with you. Is that your crash helmet?
      Bill Dana: Oh I hope not….

      Announcer: So tell us Mr. Jimenez, just where will you landing at the end of this historic mission?
      Bill Dana: Nevada.

      Announcer: Just Nevada?
      Bill Dana: Definitely Nevada. Just how far into Nevada we don’t yet know.

      1. There’s an even better one: when Bill Dana played Maxwell Smart, there’s a scene where the bad guy jumps out the window to a waiting laundry truck. Dana looks out the window, then turns to the camera and says, “Missed it by *that* much.”

          1. Yeah. I was wondering if there was an episode that had Bill Dana as an imposter Maxwell Smart.

            A funny riff on the popular spy shows of the time like The Man From U.N.C.L.E. Secret Agent (aka Danger Man in the UK) all leveraging the popularity of the Bond movies during the Cold War. Written by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry who probably collaborated outside the Cone Of Silence.

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