A spacecraft must catch a basketball-sized container while traveling four miles per second
NASA and ESA are developing the Earth Return Orbiter to perform a high-speed orbital rendezvous, catching a small Mars sample container while hurtling through space at thousands of miles per hour.
The Earth Return Orbiter faces one of the most daunting challenges in space exploration: intercepting a basketball-sized container launched from the Martian surface. While traveling at speeds of four to six kilometers per second relative to the planet, the orbiter must align itself perfectly to capture the cache within a narrow twenty-centimeter window.
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