The tallest mountain in the solar system, Olympus Mons on Mars. It has a height of 25 km, Mount Everest is 'only' 8.8 km tall.

40.2k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

And with Mar's much lower gravity, you'd fall even longer than you would on Earth!

85

u/casce Oct 07 '22

Actually, I‘m pretty sure that is not the case. Yes, Mars has only about a third of our gravity but it also has basically no atmosphere to slow you down. Your terminal velocity on Mars will be ~1000 km/h compared to only around ~200 km/h on Earth.

With Mars‘ Gravity it will take a while to reach those 1000 km/h but you will hit Earth’s terminal velocity of 200 km/h at about 1/4 of your way down so you will be falling faster than on Earth for most of the 10 km you‘d fall.

1

u/[deleted] Oct 07 '22

[deleted]

8

u/SmallDogCrimeUnit Oct 07 '22

This isnt even close to correct. You need to solve a differential equation:

dv/dt = K v^2, where K is a constant and v is the velocity.

You can solve this readily with separation of variables.

3

u/sanderson1983 Oct 08 '22

I don't know who to believe.

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u/[deleted] Oct 08 '22

Me.

-1

u/musci1223 Oct 08 '22

With gravity of around 3.741 meter per hour you will barely reach terminal velocity if there was no air resistance.

1

u/casce Oct 08 '22

You don‘t need to, you will still be faster than you would be on Earth for most of your fall

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u/biddly1 Oct 08 '22

But, there aren't any 10km tall cliffs on earth to jump off, so there is a good chance, regardless of any differences there may be to atmospheric conditions, you will be falling longer on Mars than is possible on Earth.

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u/theangleofdarkness99 Oct 08 '22

I wonder if any type of parachute or glider wings would allow you to survive... Is the atmosphere too sparse to fill a sail?

4

u/atxfun69 Oct 07 '22

- Felix Baumgartner enters the chat -

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u/Trsddppy Oct 07 '22

With the thing atmosphere, parachutes might not work either

2

u/CozImDirty Oct 07 '22

Jet pack would work though right?

2

u/AtticMuse Oct 07 '22

Yeah that's how the last two rovers have landed. Curiosity and Perseverance used rocket-powered sky-cranes to slow them down* and bring them to about 20 feet above the surface to be lowered down on cables.

After using a heat shield for initial atmospheric entry and a parachute to shed additional speed

2

u/[deleted] Oct 07 '22

Parachutes do; some of the landers used them IIRC. Mars doesn’t have much of an atmosphere but what’s there is still enough. Just need to make them a bit bigger ;)