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Maine Completes Largest To-Scale Solar System Model
Neophytus writes "The University of Maine has now almost completed its solar system model, to be unveiled officially on the June 14th at Westfield. The final planet, Uranus, will be set in place on the 13th. At forty miles from Pluto to The Sun and built to a scale of 1:93,000,000, it will be the largest three-dimensional scale model of the Solar System in North America."
We're in the largest to scale model of the solar system.
...is located in Sweden.
...that it will be using this new scale model to test launch paths for future probes to other planets. A NASA engineering demonstrated by spreading out his arms and making airplane noises while running towards Mars.
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
When they're done, they'll be mighty proud of themselves, so they'll light up a big BBQ at the center of the model, where the sun should be, and they'll grill models of invading alien motherships in the form of hamburger patties.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
"That Earth is located at Percy's Auto Sales (1.0 mile from Sun)..."
(Percy's must have pretty damn good air-conditioning)..
Add Ceres and some asteroids, to communicate just how empty an asteroid belt really is compared to the pictures in books and the depictions in sf films.
They didn't put Mars on Mars Hill. Probably for good reason, but it would have appealed to me.
Then something to explain that the nearest star is about 65,000 miles away on the same scale.
Gosh, that looks like a fun project.
Education
Edification
Realization
Wonder
Until you heard about this, did you have any real sense of the size and scale of our solar system?
How about the rest of Slashdot?
How about for those building this thing?
How about for those who visit this thing?
Imagine how tedious it is to walk from the earth to Mars, and then scale that to interplanetary scales, not even taking into account periphelion and aphelion, and gravity slingshots and lagrange tubes.
I mean, are you going to similarly argue that museums that only display known things is worthless?
GPL Deconstructed
make a moving model, it's yet another grand exercise in scale conversations, road trips and beer :).
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
collinear or coplanar?
The real Solar System is close to coplanar. At this scale, Pluto might be the only one where you'd notice the difference.
It looks like they're laying everything out in a single line rather than faithfully reflecting current orbital positions. Which makes sense -- would you like to have the job of moving Mercury? An illusion of collinearity is a good compromise compared to trying to build a 40-mile wide orrery.
One more thing to add to my scale model of the state of Maine.
I used to date this girl from Ithaca when I discovered their scale solar system. On their monuments they say the marker for Pluto is in Oahu, Hawaii. Seems to me that would be slightly larger than Maine's model.
Tea and kung-fu. Life is good. Rising Phoenix
After spending a few miserable years in ithaca, ny and staring at the "commons" walk for many a boring afternoon, I think your memories are escaping you. Pluto, is actually at the science center (somewhere on the "main road" route 13).
Ithaca's "carl sagan" walk is probably smaller than maines actually.
In fact the map is available on the net, if you want to take a look..
-bloo
it would be really funny to paint your car up like a big rock and drive it at 7 mph (651,000,000 mph in scale) to simulate an asteroid collision at near light speed.
Presumably because the model is static it is a
snapshot of the planets orbits at particular
date (with a repeating interval).
Has someone predicted when the planets will be
next be the same as the model?
Looking at the Jupiter webpage, it appears that they got carried away with the paint job. The earlier layers of painted bands look more faithful to me, then somebody put a "tomato soup" coat on it, hiding the rather even banding that is found on the real thing. Plus, the real thing is mostly light-tan, not red. I have seen the real thing through small telescopes, and Nasa tends to increase the contrast and color of their photos to bring out detail. But even those photos don't have so much red. The Mars team had extra paint or something? :-)
Further, it appears the models are round, but the larger planets are noticably "flattened" due to centrifugal rotational force.
Table-ized A.I.
A small black monolith has been spotted in the vicinity of the Jupiter model.
Researchers at the University of Maine had no comment.