91–100 of 101 posts
Does anyone else think NASA should reconsider their plans for a manned mission to Mars? With Europe, Ceres, Enceladus, Ganymede and many more promising moons out there it seems kind of a waste to spend time, effort and capital in Mars now.
Mars would be the first long-term space based mission. If you've only made a pillow-fort (ISS), or stayed in a tent in your backyard (moon), wouldn't you try to camp in your local state park before backpacking into the wilderness?
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While I'm an American engineer who prefers working in metric, since this is a space-related article I have to point you to this: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/69/ae/01/69ae0104b...
Ignoring the idiotic patriotism, that image is incorrect: Russia, China, and India have all placed landers on the moon.
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For what it's worth, there's quite a decent s-f movie "Europa Report" about a manned mission to the Jupiter's moon. It avoids most genre cliches, apart from the very ending maybe.
>It avoids most genre cliches, apart from the very ending maybe. Yeah, by being fully made of those. [SPOILER ALERT] * lack of crew psychological cross-matching * some ludicrously exoggerated hydrazine drama * chloroplast-equipped organisms in the environment which ambient light spectrum is slightly inclined towards gamma radiation (not to mention the meat-packed space vessel itself, brightly shined up by very same l…
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"Yeah I'll have a quart of Coke" certainly sounds weird. It is strange now that I think about it that we have imperial measurements for milk but metric measurements for sugary drinks/beer.
I usually buy/order sugary drinks and beer by the ounce or pint. Other than 1 and 2 liter bottles of pop, I can't really think of any time I would buy pop or beer using the metric system.
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The point being that his particular failure could've possibly been avoided if we were not using two parallel measurement systems...
How so? If I build something that doesn't conform to specifications, what does it matter if it happened to be unit conversions? They could have skipped a decimal point and not noticed, because they didn't conform to the specification. More importantly it never got checked or tested or simulated further on up the chain to catch the issue. Look at the Araine 5. Unit conversions had nothing to do with a computer saying…
Sure, the units issue was the root cause, but the resulting navigation errors should have been acted upon. They were noticed ("The discrepancy between calculated and measured position, resulting in the discrepancy between desired and actual orbit insertion altitude, had been noticed earlier by at least two navigators, whose concerns were dismissed."), but the issue wasn't acted upon. This is a management and budget problem.
Even if the units are given as SI, there are always interface issues -- which coordinate system to use, where the origin is, does z point up or down, degrees or radians. It can be hard to appreciate unless you have had experience with hard-to-find failures due to subtle numerical problems.
As you say, space is hard.
Fascinating! However, I get the cringes every time an article about space exploration uses those atavistic units like Royal Hangnails (length), Princely Bladders (volume), Regal Farts (speed) and Fornicating Fever (temperature) for measurement. Hasn't the metric system arrived yet on planet USA?
Yes it has! It conquered our soda industry and then gave up.
In this respect (partial antiquation in the wake of unit redefinitions) liters have something in common with the quart.
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If there is both vapor and ice, there must always be at least some water. If water is plentiful, space is cold, and planets are hot, liquid water should be common, regardless of how narrow the temperature conditions for it are. All temperatures from cold space to molten rock are well represented on planets.
That's not true at all. It depends on the pressure. http://d32ogoqmya1dw8.cloudfront.net/images/research_educati...
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>It avoids most genre cliches, apart from the very ending maybe. Yeah, by being fully made of those. [SPOILER ALERT] * lack of crew psychological cross-matching * some ludicrously exoggerated hydrazine drama * chloroplast-equipped organisms in the environment which ambient light spectrum is slightly inclined towards gamma radiation (not to mention the meat-packed space vessel itself, brightly shined up by very same l…
Honestly, I can't see how these are "genre cliches"
Exoggerated drama (i.e. dramatic action out of nothing or due the course of highly regulated procedures (eg. EVA)) is harder to evaluate: sometimes that drama looks quite plausible. Nevertheless, action sci-fi without some sort of team member sacrificion/unexpected death is hard to imagine, at least for me. Hell, it is not even specific to sci-fi: just take a look into any action movie out there - pretty high chances to become a witness of the dramatic death.
Very frivolous treatment of the laws of physics in general. I am pointing out that instantaneous information transmission specifically. Well, pretty much of cliche either, isn't it?
Stupid reasons for "heroicity". Are you a script writer in a search for the rationale to balance around the case of dramatic death of one or more characters? Director struggling with producers demand for fancy attention-binding activity you might be. What to do? Easy! Just place some important peace of equipment in a morbid place and there you go - engineering have been favored out by thrill.
Life. Remember that in "Babylon 5" most of aliens were anthropomorphic? Well, 90th there were, no fancy CG, and, besides, convergention one may say, right? Second decade of XXI century, Wikipedia is here and accessible in a matter of keystrokes. Why not chemothrophs, why?! Although, phototrophs could be plausible even in a shady world, convergention one may say...
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That's not true at all. It depends on the pressure. http://d32ogoqmya1dw8.cloudfront.net/images/research_educati...
Excuse me. As long as the pressure is at least 0.006 atm. Is that what your point is?
Now, if there was a single planet that had both ice and vapor water, and that planet had an atmospheric pressure of greater than 0.006 atm, then I agree that there must be some liquid water somewhere on that planet. But ice and vapor on a single planet with a sufficient atmosphere is a much higher bar to clear than two totally separate places that combined have both ice and water vapor.
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I usually buy/order sugary drinks and beer by the ounce or pint. Other than 1 and 2 liter bottles of pop, I can't really think of any time I would buy pop or beer using the metric system.
Cans of soda are most commonly 330ml.