Landing on Dres!

This mission isn’t part of a contract, I just wanted to go to Dres. Dres is a (very) small planet, like Ceres, almost just an asteroid really. It’s so small that you can land with RCS thrusters!

This rocket has a Δv of 7900 m/s, which is quite enough, the minimum being around 6700 m/s. As always, some margin here and there to be safe. And we’ll see it was indeed a good idea.

Standard ascent.

Stage 1 separation and waiting for apoapsis to circularize our orbit.

Circularizing around Kerbin, quite easy for now.

Encounter with Dres, time to slow down! Well, this little maneuver is going to cost us a lot of Δv! There are apparently several transfer windows for Dres, as its orbit isn’t in the same plane as Kerbin. I took the one that requires the most Δv, requiring around 400m/s more.

We sadly don’t have enough Δv to land… but hey! We still have RCS thrusters and a lot of monoprop! The craft and Dres being both quite light, RCS thrusters will help a lot.

Slowing down using only RCS thrusters for now.

Quite a close call! Only 13m/s remaining for fuel and 11.26 units of monoprop. We maybe could have survived 50m/s more but not much.

Chillin’ on Dres, the best planet in the system.