Why smaller probes end up more vulnerable to collisions?
In my model of that claim, it would be true, but the claim was phrased in a confusing way.
I’d build them to be very slender, so instead of “bigger” I would say “longer”, and in a sense their vulnerability to collisions would be roughly the same under changes in length (they’re moving ahead much faster than debris is moving laterally, so they’d mostly take hits from the front, which doesn’t have to expand much when we elongate them), so I would say instead that they’re more resilient, because they have more shielding (or because they have more redundancy and they retain data/functionality at the square of their in-tact mass).
In my model of that claim, it would be true, but the claim was phrased in a confusing way.
I’d build them to be very slender, so instead of “bigger” I would say “longer”, and in a sense their vulnerability to collisions would be roughly the same under changes in length (they’re moving ahead much faster than debris is moving laterally, so they’d mostly take hits from the front, which doesn’t have to expand much when we elongate them), so I would say instead that they’re more resilient, because they have more shielding (or because they have more redundancy and they retain data/functionality at the square of their in-tact mass).