Metric on Mars

In article ,
says...
In article ,
John Savard wrote:
That the Sun is 93 million miles away is indeed very well known.

I doubt that more than 10% of the US population can cite that figure.
Have any statistics to back your claim up?


93 Million ? Only if we where flying in a circle around that big ball of
fire.
Last time I checked we still had seasons on this rock; so
we must still be on that elliptical thingy.

Just my 3.14 cents.



R.B.

Red Baron wrote:

In article ,
says...
In article ,
John Savard wrote:
That the Sun is 93 million miles away is indeed very well known.

I doubt that more than 10% of the US population can cite that figure.
Have any statistics to back your claim up?


93 Million ? Only if we where flying in a circle around that big ball of
fire.
Last time I checked we still had seasons on this rock; so
we must still be on that elliptical thingy.

Just my 3.14 cents.

Seasons are due to that axis thingy being tilted.

R.B.

In article ,
Cardman wrote:
...The probe that was lost was Mars Climate
Orbiter, which unintentionally entered Mars's atmosphere while trying to
do its orbit-insertion burn.

More correctly aerobreaking, which is design to dip it into the high
Martian atmosphere in order to create drag and therefore slowing of
the craft.

No. While MCO was intended to do some of that later, it was lost during
its orbit-insertion rocket burn. There was no intent to enter the
atmosphere at that time.

So what happened to MCO is that it would have bounced off of the
Martian atmosphere and flung out into space. Makes you wonder where it
is now, not that it is working of course.

Even that is not certain. It would have lost attitude control about
halfway through the burn, as aerodynamic torques built up, and the solar
array would have broken off quickly. If the rest of the spacecraft stayed
together, the first half of the burn plus the likely velocity loss to
aerodynamic drag was just about right for capture into orbit... so
depending on exactly what happened, the remains might have ended up in
solar orbit, or might have made one orbit of Mars and burned up on the
first perigee, or might have gone straight in and died then and there.

Mars Polar Lander was lost due to a software error which had nothing to do
with units of measure.

That is incorrect.

Hint: it helps if you have actually read the MPL failure report.

They simply do not know what happened to MPL, when the last they heard
from it was as it entered the atmosphere.

While nobody can be certain, "...the Board judges there to be little doubt
about the probable cause of loss of the mission."

All parts of the most probable scenario were seen during preflight
testing, although not all in one test or the bug would have been fixed.
Assuming nothing dire happened to MPL before it reached an altitude of
about 40m and activated its touchdown logic, it's virtually certain that
the engines *would* have been cut off then and there, and MPL would have
fallen the last 40m, an unsurvivable crash.

It's conceivable that there was something else wrong *as well*, but this
bug was definitely a mission killer all by itself.
--
MOST launched 30 June; science observations running | Henry Spencer
since Oct; first surprises seen; papers pending. |

Dick Morris wrote:

Red Baron wrote:

In article ,
says...
In article ,
John Savard wrote:
That the Sun is 93 million miles away is indeed very well known.

I doubt that more than 10% of the US population can cite that figure.
Have any statistics to back your claim up?


93 Million ? Only if we where flying in a circle around that big ball of
fire.
Last time I checked we still had seasons on this rock; so
we must still be on that elliptical thingy.

Just my 3.14 cents.

Seasons are due to that axis thingy being tilted.

R.B.

However, the orbit of earth is still an elipse.

And we in the northern hemisphere are closer to our Sun
during the winter months because of that axis tilt you are
talking about.

Winter weather at the South Pole is more extreme than
weather at the North Pole.

However, when we start bringing in various factors I wonder
if the fact that the South Pole is on the Antarctic continent and
the North Pole is on top of a floating ice pack account for
some of that difference.

Mike Walsh

On Thu, 22 Jan 2004, Joona I Palaste wrote:
William Elliot scribbled the following
On Thu, 22 Jan 2004, Joona I Palaste wrote:
John Savard scribbled the following

And in the progress, newspapers are (perhaps unintentionally) preventing
their readers from ever actually *LEARNING* the metric system, thus
enforcing the current muddled state of affairs. NASA might keep losing
more and more spacecraft because of those newspapers (amongst other
factors).

I'm not much in favor of metric spaces, preferring instead normal spaces.
However Earth can hardly be called a normal space in view of the
ascendance of corporate totalitarianism. Now as metric spaces are normal
spaces and Earth is not a normal space, requiring the whole Earth to be a
metric space is not possible. ;-)

We seem to be talking about different interpretations of the term
"metric". Do you have a topology background?

Indeed, have you not noticed my small contributions to sci.math
on topology? I've many a time seen your topology problems there.

(Stephen Graham) writes:

That's not really comprehending the distance. All the diagram gives
you is proportional scale.

Most of us comprehend how far 100 or 1,000 miles are. Those are distances
that we more or less routinely travel in this day and age. Beyond that,
well, it just gets arbitrary.

(sarcastically) You don't really comprehend those short distances.
Your routine travels are all mapped on proportional scales.

No, if I give you a number with units and you know it corresponds to
something familiar, be it the desktop before you or a mental image of
the solar system, then you comprehend it. If you ask me to associate
6,000,000 inches with something I'm familiar with, I wouldn't even
try, even though it's a familiar distance. I wouldn't comprehend that
quantity. But 93,000,000 miles I comprehend enough to say I do. It's
the distance to the sun; much more than the distance to the moon and
much less than the distance to Jupiter or Pluto. It's something I
know, if not nearly as well as I know the back of my hand.

William Elliot scribbled the following
on misc.metric-system:
On Thu, 22 Jan 2004, Joona I Palaste wrote:
William Elliot scribbled the following
On Thu, 22 Jan 2004, Joona I Palaste wrote:
John Savard scribbled the following

And in the progress, newspapers are (perhaps unintentionally) preventing
their readers from ever actually *LEARNING* the metric system, thus
enforcing the current muddled state of affairs. NASA might keep losing
more and more spacecraft because of those newspapers (amongst other
factors).

I'm not much in favor of metric spaces, preferring instead normal spaces.
However Earth can hardly be called a normal space in view of the
ascendance of corporate totalitarianism. Now as metric spaces are normal
spaces and Earth is not a normal space, requiring the whole Earth to be a
metric space is not possible. ;-)

We seem to be talking about different interpretations of the term
"metric". Do you have a topology background?

Indeed, have you not noticed my small contributions to sci.math
on topology? I've many a time seen your topology problems there.

Now that you mention it, I remember you being one of those who've helped
me with my topology homework. Thanks for that.

--
/-- Joona Palaste ) ------------- Finland --------\
\-- http://www.helsinki.fi/~palaste --------------------- rules! --------/
"Shh! The maestro is decomposing!"
- Gary Larson

"Dick Morris" wrote in message ...
Red Baron wrote:
In article ,
says...
In article ,
John Savard wrote:

That the Sun is 93 million miles away is indeed very well known.

I doubt that more than 10% of the US population can cite that figure.
Have any statistics to back your claim up?

93 Million ? Only if we where flying in a circle around that big ball of
fire.
Last time I checked we still had seasons on this rock; so
we must still be on that elliptical thingy.

Just my 3.14 cents.

Seasons are due to that axis thingy being tilted.


Yeah! In fact people on the northern hemisphere are closer to the Sun
in the winter than during the summer. In 10,000 years that'll have
changed because of general relativity making the orbit meander.



--
__ "A good leader knows when it's best to ignore the __
('__` screams for help and focus on the bigger picture." '__`)
//6(6; ©OOL mmiv :^)^\\
`\_-/ http://home.t-online.de/home/ulrich....lmann/redbaron \-_/'

"Ool" writes:

Yeah! In fact people on the northern hemisphere are closer to the Sun
in the winter than during the summer. In 10,000 years that'll have
changed because of general relativity making the orbit meander.

Not exactly. The Earth's axis itself rotates (this is called precession)
far more quickly than the axes of the Earth's orbit, and the rotation of
the orbit is caused almost completely by the interference of other
planets; the effect of general relativity is nearly insignificant.

--
Esa Peuha
student of mathematics at the University of Helsinki
http://www.helsinki.fi/~peuha/

"Michael Walsh" wrote in message
...

snip

And we in the northern hemisphere are closer to our Sun
during the winter months because of that axis tilt you are
talking about.

Winter weather at the South Pole is more extreme than
weather at the North Pole.

However, when we start bringing in various factors I wonder
if the fact that the South Pole is on the Antarctic continent and
the North Pole is on top of a floating ice pack account for
some of that difference.


It was recently mentioned in the media as one reason that New Zealand gets
more UV radiation in summer than equivalent places in the Northern
Hemisphere.


--
Errol Cavit |
If you took the whole of Norway, scrunched it up a bit, shook out all the
moose and reindeer, hurled it 10,000 miles around the world and filled it
with birds then you'd be wasting your time because it looks very much like
someone has already done it.
Douglas Adams, describing Fiordland, _Last Chance to See_