Mirror Jams on Venus Express Spacecraft

tsarina writes "The European Space Agency is trying to fix a stuck instrument on its Venus Express spacecraft. A mirror in front of its interferometer is not pointing in the right direction, making it useless until it is moved. Managers hope to fix the Planetary Fourier Spectrometer this week. An identical instrument on the Mars Express probe has also acted up, but it is currently working properly.""

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Hammer, Feather, Freefall on the Moon: Revisited

[Anonymous Coward]

"Fall heavy towards the moon, and the moon falls also towards you." -- Nietzsche

Hammer and feather are dropped simultaneously from equal heights (as measured by distance from the center of the moon), separated laterally by a distance substantially less than the moon's diameter. Both hammer and feather experience force from the moon's gravity proportional to their mass, and hence both accelerate at the same rate. Meanwhile, the moon is also accelerating towards the other two objects, but unevenly so: the hammer exerts a greater gravitational pull due to its greater mass. The moon is therefore subject to a torque, causing it to accelerate more rapidly towards the hammer.

The hammer is first to hit the ground.

Anyone who denies this truth is a spatially absolutist lunocentric whose refusal to recognize the validity of hammer mechanics/experience places him wholly beyond the help of Galilean metaphysics. Such hammer (feather) rejectionists ought to be banished to the stars, for their own good and for the good of not only hammers and feathers but all subjugated smaller objects, everywhere, who find themselves victims of this scientifically perpetrated emassculation.

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