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James Webb telescope reaches its final destination in space, million miles away

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Re: James Webb telescope reaches its final destination in space, million miles away

#191

Post by metalliqaz »

Steltek wrote: post #151
snakeboy wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just out of curiosity, is it considered best practice these days to use the gender-neutral "their" even with a specific subject (Obama) who is known to use masculine pronouns for himself?

I think it would be nice if English evolved to only ungendered pronouns. Eliminates accidental offense while also reducing everyone's cognitive load. Also, you reminded me of a quote from yesterday: "The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore."

It costs me absolutely zero cognitive load. You don't have to worry about that.

Now, trying to parse out if "they" is meant to refer to a group or an individual when used in place of s/he, that does take some work.

Re: James Webb telescope reaches its final destination in space, million miles away

#193

Post by omnicognate »

Maxburn wrote: post #192

Question; why is the Where is Webb page saying current speed is .1255 miles/second? There's a blurb in the explainer that says that speed is Earth relative. https://jwst.nasa.gov/content/webbLaunch/whereIsWebb.html?s=...

It's in orbit round L2, not stationary relative to Earth.

Video as linked by another comment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cUe4oMk69E&list=TLGG8tIphgp...

Re: James Webb telescope reaches its final destination in space, million miles away

#194

Post by etskinner »

egeozcan wrote: post #122
Sharlin wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s really easy to get a wrong intuitive sense of the size of these things! I don’t understand why space agencies don’t always have human figures for reference in their visualizations. Or even a simple scale bar! We just get these silly “the size of a tennis court” type textual comparisons. Few people realize how big the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers are, as another example.

> Few people realize how big the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers are To be fair, Perseverance looks as big as I imagined it would be, about the size of an SUV but wider (because even in 2020s, they still don't have streets in mars, what a bummer): https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/05/science/mars-2020-rover-n... Or did my googling fail me? :) edit: direct image link around paywall: https://static01.nyt.com/images/202…

https://archive.is/tpcRK for the article

Re: James Webb telescope reaches its final destination in space, million miles away

#195

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

WithinReason wrote: post #127
itazula wrote: post #22

This animation, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cUe4oMk69E&list=TLGG8tIphgp... is a nice visualization of the L2 orbit. It was different than what I expected.

For some reason I expected it to stay in Earth's shadow. L2 is probably too far from Earth for that.

They specifically avoid earth's shadow because they use solar panels (by shadow here, I mean penumbra, they're too far away to be in total shadow).

Re: James Webb telescope reaches its final destination in space, million miles away

#196

Post by aksss »

Sharlin wrote: post #80
PinkMilkshake wrote: post #3

I'm a little embarrassed to say this and I don't know exactly what I pictured in my head, but I had no idea these telescopes were so big[1]. I guess I never saw one pictured next to a human. I've only seen pictures of satellites being worked on so I expected something more human sized? It seems so stupid now, especially since earth telescopes are huge. [1] https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a010000/a013500/a013522/JWST_v.…

It’s really easy to get a wrong intuitive sense of the size of these things! I don’t understand why space agencies don’t always have human figures for reference in their visualizations. Or even a simple scale bar! We just get these silly “the size of a tennis court” type textual comparisons. Few people realize how big the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers are, as another example.

I believe the banana is the Internet standard for visual scale.

Re: James Webb telescope reaches its final destination in space, million miles away

#197

Post by sillyquiet »

dboshardy wrote: post #150
Tenemo wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Destin's channel is one of the older, best-known channels in the YT's educational sphere. Recently, the US Navy even let him on a multi-day tour of a nuclear submarine and tape classified information (later redacted). He himself worked in the military. I don't think that it's fair calling him a random youtuber, to me he seems like the perfect youtuber to interview such people (as Destin himself has a background in ro…

> the US Navy even let him on a multi-day tour of a nuclear submarine and tape classified information (later redacted) They _paid_ him to tour it. It was a marketing event for the US Navy to drive recruitment.

They did? I am not disagreeing, just wondering if he disclosed that or how you found out.

Re: James Webb telescope reaches its final destination in space, million miles away

#198

Post by billforsternz »

munificent wrote: post #190
Steltek wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it would be nice if English evolved to only ungendered pronouns. Eliminates accidental offense while also reducing everyone's cognitive load. Also, you reminded me of a quote from yesterday: "The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore."

I don't disagree with you, but I think it's worth pointing out that there is a pragmatic benefit to gendered pronouns. You can think of pronouns as sort of like `$?` in bash or `_` in Python's interactive shell. They give you a short way to refer to a previously mentioned noun. When you have more than one of these "special variables", you can use them more often as long as they conveniently get uniformly distributed…

Interesting rationalisation for gendered inanimate nouns in romance languages, thanks. Also used in many/most other Germanic (and other language families?) right? Is your explanation a personal inspiration or established theory? For it to make sense they would need to (for example) refer to (say) a table as 'he' later in a sentence. Do they do that?

Re: James Webb telescope reaches its final destination in space, million miles away

#199

Post by beiller »

spookthesunset wrote: post #185
_joel wrote: post #51

I really can't wait until the have proper first light. They say June will be the earliest after phasing has completed, but it can't come soon enough. That being said, I've waited 25 years so far, a few more months won't hurt

I'm sure there will be "test photos" that get published in the interim. I'd be seriously disappointed if there wasn't.

Yes does any one know when first light photos will appear? I know it is very unknown but I've seen many NASA employees live suggest there will be some interim first light photos to come and I am super excited to see them.

Re: James Webb telescope reaches its final destination in space, million miles away

#200

Post by aksss »

cronix wrote: post #163
wongarsu wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard the (probably unfounded) story that the Soviets saw the Space Shuttle, couldn't figure out why the Americans would build it but figured there surely must be a good reason; so they copied it to also have whatever capability the Americans were after.

It's not unfounded, and they knew about it before it ever flew once. A family member was in the CIA at the time (later at NSA and RAND) and played a role after they were sent to the USSR after graduating college to study Russian (paid for by CIA, they know 8 languages). They translated the technical Russian Buran plans/documents and decoded them for our scientists to compare to their own, as well as help slip design…

In re the youtube vid, that's a flippin' huge hanger. Crazy that this stuff is sitting dormant.
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