The cabin was colder on Thursday, but the crew has been able to adjust the temperature.
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As Artemis II zooms to the Moon, everything seems to be going swimmingly
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Metric is, with our base-10 number system, much easier to convert units in our head. That can't be denied! That's great! But in actual day to day use it isn't really that meaningful. Oh you live 70 miles away? How many feet is thet? 70 * 5280, ugh*. But it doesn't matter because I don't intuit the distance of 70 miles by imagining a foot and mentally extrapolating it 369,600 times. I know what 70 miles is because of a lifetime of exposure to various distances like 1, 10, 50, 100 miles, etc.
Similarly in metric, oh hey 70 km is 70,000 meters! Much easier! Again, you're not looking at your meter stick and mentally laying 70,000 of them end to end to understand that distance.
Units are to some extent part of our linguistics. Also everyone always lets the UK, Canada, Australia etc off the hook for mixing units! Imagine my disappointment when I ordered a pot of beer in Australia and got a medium-sized thimble.
*I made basically this same post the other day and used 100 miles as my example, which someone pointed out is actually pretty easy to turn into feet!
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There are two major measuring systems in the world. One was used to land humans on the moon and the other one is metric.
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There's no accounting for individual taste, but usually it's the other way round IMO.
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I'm kinda with you on this, although I guess out of all human bigotry being a zealot about units of measurement is one of the most innocuous. And I agree with randomuser42 in that I think of unit choice as more a matter of lanquage than anything else.
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Thomas Cochrane
Ars Centurion
Very cool to see you on the Livestream, Eric. I get the impression that NASA is either very relaxed with the mission so far, or working very hard to appear relaxed. Or maybe not so hard: the chit-chat on comms seemed genuinely happy & relaxed.
I'm very much enjoying this event, and loving how the moon gets a wee bit bigger every time I check the livestream. Pity they don't have a backwards-facing camera to show the earth shrinking.
I'm very much enjoying this event, and loving how the moon gets a wee bit bigger every time I check the livestream. Pity they don't have a backwards-facing camera to show the earth shrinking.
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I’m constantly amazed at the sheer amount of computing resources Outlook can suck down just to check emails and manage calendars.
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I understand your intent, but I feel like this mission (Artemis II) is not truly a shakedown cruise. Why? Because Artemis III is a completely separate ship. Sure, we would hope that the two ships would perform identically. I wonder how much variation there is.
Edit: I don't know that there is a term which covers "testing the Nth iteration of a vessel in order to anticipate / remedy issues in the N+1th iteration".
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I remember, nearly forty years ago now, my high school physics teacher saying metric was going to be used in his class for everything except temperature. Temperature he didn’t care what we used since they are both just arbitrary measurement scales.
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Both versions are available that illustrates how much the exposure got shifted to produce a bright Africa versus what we'd expect to see with the eye:
https://www.nasa.gov/image-detail/amf-art002e000193/
https://www.nasa.gov/image-detail/fd02_for-pao/
(from the album so far)
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You are mixing opinions about metric system with ones about decimal system, they aren't the same thing, albeit they live pretty nicely together.
Now while the choice of the meter is debatable: the proposal of 96cm unit (the length of a pendulum with a 1 s period) was way more logical than what we have now, the decimal system is not.
Could have been 12 / 16 / 60, each one could have advantages and disadvantages, for sure a sane multiplier (no matter of what the multiplier
is) is better than (sub)units that have nothing to do each other
Just look at the mess that was the British pound before the decimalization
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pound_sterling
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The meter and the gram are arbitrary as well. The meter was originally defined as 1/10,000,000 the distance from the pole to the equator at the longitude of Paris, and the kilogram was derived as 1000 cubic centimeters of water.
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Toilets man. An eternal source of problems in space and on boats too. We will know we are a spacefaring species when we design a toilet which works one year in space with no maintenance or repairs. Given track record on marine toilets it likely will be a while.
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Fahrenheit and Celsius are equally arbitrary. Kelvin is only half as arbitrary.
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Thanks! I see the earth rotated between the images, so the brighter one came second. Also, the darker one lacks the bright dots near the center. I suppose someone can figure out what indicators are in that reflection.
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They seem to be tricky alright. Not sure how you prevent future problems like this. Always orient the spacecraft towards the sun when doing a water dump? Add heating elements to the port? Add an external laser to shoot the icicles away?
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The kind of marketing you can't buy. NASA started releasing downloaded photos from the crew PCD (personal communication devices) which are iphone 17. This was actually taken just prior to the TLI while they were falling to the low earth perigee. They only had excess data to downlink it today. Iphone is going to have the first smartphone photos BEO.
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Add enough insulation so the vent vents before anything freezes inside it? I guess when not in use it will slowly cool off.
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Never understood the fish eye lens bit by flerfers. So you are conceding they went up space and took a picture of earth and are still heading to moon, just that they are disguising the earths shape in the photo?
And how does orbiting work if the earth is flat? Why is the moon and all other planets a sphere?
What would even be the point? If NASA has to be careful about returning to land on the “up” side of the earth, why won’t they just admit it? NASAs nerds love explaining everything they do and discover.
Or are the globe manufacturers so powerful they are paying off all the space companies and astronauts in order to keep Walmart sales up?
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Due both to bad weather and having started in a large city, it wasn't until I'd been in Australia for a week that I got to see the night sky. And it was far more disorienting than I could have imagined. Then, while I'm staring at these stars that make no sense to me whatsoever, I suddenly realize for the first time that ever since I'd landed the sun had been in the northern sky instead of the southern.
These things are intellectually obvious but when I suddenly understood they were applying to me and that the sky wasn't at all what I was used to, it felt like my inner ears spun around and I was hit with a wave of dizziness so intense that I stumbled while I was standing still.
The only thing I can compare the feeling to is the time I was sitting in a train station and the train next to mine began to pull out. It accelerated, going faster and faster until the last car passed by and I suddenly realized that the train I thought was leaving was standing still and it was actually the train I was on that was moving at a fairly good clip. My head spun around with disorientation that time too.
Frames of reference are a bitch, man.
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Driving in England for the first time, could be an even more traumatic experience (literally traumatic in the worst case).
But even smaller things can be surprising, like having to twist an electrical wire after it was twisted by the former electrician who happen to be left handed...
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Looking forward to the premiere next week, but tbh I think the marketing for Elon's relaunch of the Iron Sky franchise feels a bit much
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They did not. Later NASA moved to metric calculations and in fact after losing a couple of probes they instituted a policy to be 100% metric.
The original docs for Apollo are still available and public domain. It is all pounds, feet, inches, short tons, and pounds of force. DeltaV calculations and velocity call outs were all in feet per second. We have transcripts and audio and yes as jaring as it is to hear there were calls to perform a PC+2 burn for 38 fps. Instruments in the apollo CSM and LM likewise graduates in feet, miles and fps.
Still it was largely a joke. Not saying US customary is better but NASA did use it to land on the moon.
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First random document I found about apollo 12 (dated 1970)
https://pds-geosciences.wustl.edu/lunar/urn-nasa-pds-a12sws_raw_arcsav/document/a12_psr_ch5_sws.pdf
It's all Centigrades and km/sec.
May be an exception, but....
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I watched the liftoff and insertion into low earth orbit (LEO) for Artemis II a few days ago. I didn't watch the trans lunar injection (TLI) burn, so I don't know what information NASA or the news sources passes along to the general public.
What's interesting to me is that before the TLI, NASA put the astronauts into an elongated earth elliptical orbit (EEO) with a low point (perigee) about 563 km above the surface of the Earth and a high point (apogee) about 70,000 km high. As Orion fell through the perigee of the EEO, the main engine on the European Service Module was fired for 5 minutes and 50 seconds to send the astronauts to the Moon.
NASA did this to take advantage of a phenomenon called the Oberth Effect in order to increase the speed by about 385 m/sec without expending any propellant for that extra speed. The Orion Service Module's main engine has a lower thrust-to-weight ratio than the Apollo-era Saturn V upper stage. Maximizing the Oberth Effect was essential to achieve the necessary orbital energy efficiently.
Using the Oberth Effect allowed NASA to save propellant for critical trajectory correction burns during the 10-day mission. The precise timing of the burn at perigee placed Orion on a "figure-eight" path that uses lunar gravity to "slingshot" the crew back to Earth without requiring another major engine firing.
The Oberth Effect is named for physicist Hermann Oberth who described it in his 1929 book "Paths to Spaceflight".
What's interesting to me is that before the TLI, NASA put the astronauts into an elongated earth elliptical orbit (EEO) with a low point (perigee) about 563 km above the surface of the Earth and a high point (apogee) about 70,000 km high. As Orion fell through the perigee of the EEO, the main engine on the European Service Module was fired for 5 minutes and 50 seconds to send the astronauts to the Moon.
NASA did this to take advantage of a phenomenon called the Oberth Effect in order to increase the speed by about 385 m/sec without expending any propellant for that extra speed. The Orion Service Module's main engine has a lower thrust-to-weight ratio than the Apollo-era Saturn V upper stage. Maximizing the Oberth Effect was essential to achieve the necessary orbital energy efficiently.
Using the Oberth Effect allowed NASA to save propellant for critical trajectory correction burns during the 10-day mission. The precise timing of the burn at perigee placed Orion on a "figure-eight" path that uses lunar gravity to "slingshot" the crew back to Earth without requiring another major engine firing.
The Oberth Effect is named for physicist Hermann Oberth who described it in his 1929 book "Paths to Spaceflight".
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I wonder if they get any signal (receiving only) out there on their mobile phones. Because of signal leak from Earth. The mobile phones do not have the power to reach any transmitter on Earth, since max transmission power is just 2W at certain frequencies and just 1W at lower frequencies. Speed might be a problem, since 4G and 5G are just rated for maximum speed of 200km/h (trains), after that the doppler effect becomes a problem.
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I drove in Australia and lived to tell the tale. Although in my memories of driving in Australia, everything is flipped. My brain has decided to "correct" them and put me in the left hand seat and the car in the right hand lane.
TBH, I have more trauma from driving in rural Mexico. And from going around a roundabout in France four times because none of the signs said what I expected and I could only process one at a time with each orbit.
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If I remember correctly those are GSM power limits (in 2G/2.5G/2.75G), newer technologies should have much lower power limits (like 1/4 of that).
I personally tested HSDPA (evolved 3G) on a 300 km/h train when both things were novelties (2005 or so), traveling from Turin to Milan, I had a constant download at 1.8 Mbps, which was the maximum the technology had to offer at the time, nowaday thousand of people work and call on 300 km/h trains on all high speed trains across all the Italian high speed lines (and I'm sure it's the same in France, Spain, Germany and so on).
A share of them use the now widespread WIFI, but usually 3/4/5G connection is way faster and reliable.
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Or the NASA high budget, comes from the long ethernet cable they're using
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Orion actually has a wifi network I don't know if the phones connect to it but it is used for non critical systems like wing cameras. As for the prior post and LTE/5G I would imagine that is just disabled on the phones to save power.
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Being in a spaceship headed to a place where (literally) no man has gone before, with the phones in "airplane mode" is a bit offensive
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There's definitely no signal out there. Cell sites deliberately point sideways and LEO non-terrestrial cells are pointing very much down (as required!). Plus the bit where a few hundred miles are very different from 100k miles for a device without much for antenna directionality. In a human-grade space tin.
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