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ESA and NASA Establish a Joint Mars Exploration Initiative
Matt_dk sends in a Spacefellowship article: "The ESA Director of Science and Robotic Exploration, David Southwood, met NASA's Associate Administrator for Science, Ed Weiler, in Plymouth, UK, to establish a way for a progressive programme for exploration of the Red Planet. The outcome of the bilateral meeting was an agreement to create a Mars Exploration Joint Initiative (MEJI) that will provide a framework for the two agencies to define and implement their scientific, programmatic and technological goals at Mars."
Can someone just put this into a car analogy for me? I'm not really sure what this MEJI is supposed to do. What is it used for?
So how'd we go from "zomg! we've got 8 years to get to the moon. Go Go Go!" 40 years ago but today we're just launching probes and taking walks in space outside of an orbiting station occasionally. What have we been doing? Where would we have been if we'd kept up the pace from the moon landing?
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
...on cm vs inches?
no sig
Please tell me that there going to define a standerd first, i don't want my tax dollers to fund a 10 billion bullet that hits mars dead square at 12000 mph, or misses it by 3 million miles.
"*Boom* uuh we have a problem, was that perigee in Miles or Kilomoters?"
O.o
Europe is not a country. It is a continent. Even more so; The US uses Imperial while most of the world uses Metric, not just another country.
All the fault of the Stonecutters...
According to Parkinson, independently of the fleet out there, every organisation will, over the years, successfully build out a bureaucracy. And I rather be behind a desk than stowed small anywhere on a ship.
Yes, but you have to admit that the Europeans act as a single country when it comes to spaceflight. ESA has institutes all over Europe, and they are all cooperating, and have researchers from all over Europe.
Besides, the British are part of the EU too, and they insist on using the imperial system too... Even worse, their imperial system might differ from the other imperial system(s?). Pity that Napoleon never invaded the UK :D
(Napoleon is said to have spread the Metric system to other countries)
In the good old days an ESA launch was French when successful and strictly ESA otherwise.
USA - Many member states connected under a federal government, each state also has local governance EU - Many member states connected under a federal government, each state also has local governance
Besides, the British are part of the EU too, and they insist on using the imperial system too...
This has not been true for science and engineering for many many years.
Please don't assume that, because the bulk of the population exhibits the natural human characteristics of unwillingness to change when the current system 'works', and are encouraged by the more rabid press (who have such a distrust of 'Johnny Foreigner' and his evil doings) that we don't do real work in metric.
BTW there was a parliamentary select committee (in 1862) recommending a switch to metric units so this is not a new thing -- we just don't like to rush into things too quickly :-)
Indeed a lot of our shopping is done in kilogrammes, litres... and legal work uses hectares rather than acres.
It's just some older measures are retained - partly for nostalgia [beer in pints], partly because pandering to sentiment / distrust of the new is [sadly] seen as a vote winner.
There is also the psychological issue that comparative measures tend to be slightly bigger in metric units (eg 500g is approximately 10% bigger than 1 lb) so shops selling packaged items had a 'perceived' price hike when switching over to metric - again another resentment easily stoked up as a price increase soundbite (without the compensating increase in delivery being mentioned) is always a winner in newspaper circulation.
A lot of people (me included) work quite happily with both systems - sometimes even mixing them in creative ways (eg fuel consumption in miles/litre). For practical purposes I use metric - for domestic use then either metric or imperial or both
Only old people in Britain use imperial. Kids have been learning metric as the main system for decades. Pretty much the only imperial measurement that is still used on a regular basis in the UK is the mile.
the brits switched to Metric ages ago for all things technical, it is still only used for drink measurements in bars and in the local food market (although they have to display the weight, etc in mettric as well)
if (!signature) { throw std::runtime_error("No sig!"); }
There is also the psychological issue that comparative measures tend to be slightly bigger in metric units
Except, thank God, for the mighty pint!!! mmm, continental lager....
if (!signature) { throw std::runtime_error("No sig!"); }
Hey bro, what is a bicycle?? We use canoes here please get your facts straight!
And the pint. And sometimes the stone. But yeah, mainly metric.
Brain surgery - it's not rocket science!
In fact, NASA already have that problem. Fact is... US switched to the metric system like most other countries. General science are on board, ofcourse, since it the imperial system makes no sense and is therefor not very useful in science, and especially in international reports. The military are easy to convince (SIR! YES, SIR! METRIC IT IS, SIR!) and NASA comes from both military and science, so they are with the program also.
Not so with the general public, which sometimes caused problems with NASA getting parts made in some stupid imperial sizes instead of real units, so if anything, that's less likely to happen if half the things in the join program is from Europe (which is not a country).
Thanks for the info, next time I'll look for the Californian embassy if I need a visum.
Besides, the British are part of the EU too, and they insist on using the imperial system too...
Only for beer, it means that we get 13% more than the 500ml glasses used elsewhere.
"Welcome to our world. We are the wasted youth. And we are the future too." Yes, I know these are stupid lyrics.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. The EU is not a federal government, power still lies with the national governments. In fact the EU is only an association of sovereign states, a supranational state.
The European Parliament is powerless, the Commission has some powers.
And the EU only has 27 member countries out of 47 European countries! The EU is in NO way synonymous with Europe.
This is a common mistake that many Americans make nowadays, assuming that the EU is some kind of federal government of Europe. It is most certainly not.
And the United States of America consists of 50 independent sovereign states and 3 territories out of the 91 states in North America (US, Canada, Mexico, apologies to the smaller Caribbean and Central American states). Or at least, the states started as sovereign until a certain president violated the constitution to wage war against the Confederacy over their legal and rightful succession.
What other imperial systems ? It's called the "Imperial" system because it was ours, we were the empire that "Imperial" refers to !
Inches, yards, furlongs, acres, quarts, grains, ounces, rods, chains, pecks, bushels and hundredweight. The US uses some of the names, but it is not the Imperial system.
Besides which, there is not a factory in the country that measures in anything other than metric units, and hasn't been for a long time. They may provide a handy conversion on the products, but a pint of milk is still sold and marked as 568ml.
As for Napoleon, how did he get on in Russia ? We have prisons around here built by Napoleonic prisoners of war.
And feet, for height. :-( We're retarded.
== Jez ==
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Even more so; The US uses Imperial while most of the world uses Metric, not just another country.
Actually, it's not just "most of the world". The US appears to be just about the only country not transitioning away from imperial units (cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_customary_units and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_units).
I looked into it at some time ago for a web site that had product sizes in cm. I had to implement an exception for visitors from just one country. If you're from the US, I've officially hated you since that day.
The EU and Europe are not the same entities. And the ESA is something else entirely.
Actually, in this age of computers, I don't see any intrinsic advantage to metric, but I see lots of intrinsic advantages for the Imperial system.
Who can visualize something divided by ten or even worse four tenths? I can easily visualize something half or a third of any given length. Furthermore English units are related to something immediately tangible: I can walk out a floor measurement in feet. Yards are also ultimately related to the length of an arm. But millionths of the arc distance from the pole to the equator? Please.
Why not call it "Mars Association for Roving and Study"?