Astronauts Having Trouble With Tranquility Module

Coldeagle writes "Astronauts ran into trouble while trying to connect up the new Tranquility module onto the ISS. A critical insulating cover didn't fit quite right: 'The fabric, multilayered cover is supposed to go between Tranquility and its observation deck, but the metal bars are not locking down properly because of interference from a hand rail or some other structure at the hatch.' One has to wonder if this is another imperial/metric snafu."

Comments

Metric Everywhere

[elzurawka]

Atleast in scientific application there is no reason to use Imperial. Metric makes all calculations simpler, and is accepted by a much larger portion of the world, and should be the standard in all science.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[profplump]

He means that metric makes prefix-changing calculations easier, even though no one ever does those outside of middle school science classes. And he's assuming that you'll ignore the fact the most real-world calculations involve a coefficient that isn't a multiple of 10 because the physical world is not dictated by our measurement system, even when using SI units -- is 6.67300 × 10^-11 m^3 kg^-1 s^-2 somehow easier to use than 1.06891206 × 10^-9 feet^3 pounds-force^-1 s^-2?

Used by a large portion of the world is a good point. There's great value in having everyone use the same system. Of course there's also an enormous cost in switching between systems, and little direct benefit to anyone who was happy with the old system, which is why no one does it.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[AdmiralXyz]

You're absolutely right, but I detect in your voice that you think some people disagree with you. This is something I see a lot, especially from Europeans: the assumption that Americans are actually fanatical supporters of the Imperial system. The truth is, we don't like it (can't speak for the UK, but I suspect it's similar). There isn't anyone in America who actually believes that the Imperial system is easier or more useful. The reason it persists is simply one of tradition, and the enormous expense (in terms of money and headaches) it would take to move the entire country over to a new system.

For example, I have basically no concept in my mind of how far a "kilometer" is. Oh, I know it's .62 miles, and I can usually do the conversion in my head, but I don't have an intuitive, subconscious sense of how far a kilometer is, like I do for a mile. I suspect most people raised on the metric system are the same way for Imperial units, it's just not easy to get a natural sense of the units you didn't grow up with. An entire country of people who don't have an intuitive sense of the units they're using would be chaos.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[socceroos]

Not to mention movies like "the Green Kilometer" - doesn't have the same ring to it.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[navyjeff]

Here's a handy guide to get an intuitive sense of metric measurements.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[ircmaxell]

I am an american, and I do believe the Imperial system is a lot easier to use. For me. Because that's what I learned from day 1. Do I think it's better? No way. Do I think it should be changed to metric? Absolutely. But the fact that most people would have a very hard time with switch is why it hasn't happened. The only way it would be able to happen is with a (possibly multiple) decade long "dual usage"... That way kids would be taught from the beginning, and regular people would have time to learn the new system...

Re:Metric Everywhere

[Pentium100]

He means that metric makes prefix-changing calculations easier, even though no one ever does those outside of middle school science classes. And he's assuming that you'll ignore the fact the most real-world calculations involve a coefficient that isn't a multiple of 10 because the physical world is not dictated by our measurement system, even when using SI units -- is 6.67300 × 10^-11 m^3 kg^-1 s^-2 somehow easier to use than 1.06891206 × 10^-9 feet^3 pounds-force^-1 s^-2?

Prefix changing calculations are used a lot even outside middle school. If you have measurements in smaller units (mL, cups) and need to convert them to larger units (m^3, ft^3) because you have some table which only lists the larger units (for example a table of volume densities of various materials), then you need to do more complex calculations in the imperial system.

1mL=1e-6 m^3
1cup = 0.00835503472 ft^3

and here is when you get the extra complexity.

that's the point. While the coefficients that were observed in the real world rarely match our units evenly, with metric system at least the units themselves are a power of 10 of larger and smaller units.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh well, re-adjusting your intuition to new units of measure isn't nearly as hard as it seems at first, before you actually have to do it. I say this as an european, who not that long ago switched from a national currency to an european one. Back then, many people were scared of the very same thing, but it really didn't take long for people to adapt. I guess it would be pretty much the same for any physical unit relevant for people's everyday lives.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[skirmish666]

It's also useful for conversion of units - 1,000 cm^3 is equivalent to 1Litre(of water) which weighs 1 Kilogram, 1 Joule = 1 Newton over 1 Meter = 1 Watt Second etc.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[epp_b]

Not to mention movies like "the Green Kilometer" - doesn't have the same ring to it.

*ahem*

"The Green 1.6 Kilometres"

Re:Metric Everywhere

[dronkert]

Funny as always. Still, 3 l in a two-liter bottle?

Re:Metric Everywhere

[QuoteMstr]

Indeed. I'm an American, but I'm familiar with SI units. If I tell a friend that something is about two meters long, he's surprised, but he understands what I mean. That goes for everyone. Even in the US, people intuitively grasp how much a liter is, how heavy a kilogram is, and how long a kilometer is. We seem to have more trouble with temperature and speed though. I'm still a little taken aback when I drive into Canada and see speed limits far higher than what I'm used to.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[dgatwood]

When visiting other countries switching over to metric for time...

How are those ten day weeks working out for you, anyway? :-D

Re:Metric Everywhere

[Hadlock]

The Green Klick (Click?)

Re:Metric Everywhere

[skine]

Yes, metric is easier to convert between different types of units (cups to ft^3, as in your example), and often different units within a single measure (inches to miles). This is why it's the customary measurement for scientific purposes.

However, in daily life, it's rare for any extremely difficult conversion to come up. Cooking is an example where it may prove difficult, but when I started cooking as a child I memorized "3 tsp to a tbsp, 4 tbsp to 1/4 cup," and "8 fl oz to a cup, 2 cups to a pint, two pints to a quart, four quarts to a gallon." As I know the powers of two, this means that, off the top of my head, there are 768 tsp in a gallon, which again is 128 fl oz.

Distance can be tricky, but I would say that, again, it works in practice. Also, I'll claim that it's much more interesting (to a certain kind of nerd, at least).

The history of Standard (US Customary) Units of course comes from Britain, and most of them are in some way organic. The foot, of course, should be fairly obvious. The inch has been postulated to derive from words meaning one-twelfth, or thumb. Either way, in English law, it was defined as three widths of a barleycorn. The yard is generally considered to be half a fathom (ie half a "wingspan").

The mile has a stranger history. It comes from the miles used by Ancient Romans, which was exactly 5000 Roman feet (which, with the increase in foot size over time, would be about 4500 feet today). However, the English compared a mile to eight furlongs, where a furlong is about how far a horse could pull a plow before needing to rest. The difference between common measures and measures used specifically for surveying led this to be 5280 ft.

Wikipedia finds it important to mention that Abe Simpson claims “My car gets forty rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it!” That is, where a rod is 1/40 furlong, or 1/320 mi and a hogshead is roughly 63 gallons. This means that the fuel economy is .002 miles per gallon.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[CharlieG]

Actually, Aircraft , and for that matter, almost all machine shop work is done in decimal inches (of course except for fastener sizes, which are their own odd 'wire gage' sizes, but are not really added/subtracted), and measurements are usually NOT reduced to feet and inches, so you'll see things like 78.50 inches (and yes, the significant figures matter for tolerances, so 78 1/2 - which yes is sometimes used in old drawings is different than 78.5, 78.50 and 78.500)

So, yes, metric IS easier, but the inch system is not as bad as you think in doing industrial work )and yes, I have scales (what most of you would cale a ruler) that have 1/32nds, 64ths, 10ths and 100ths all on the same scale

Re:Metric Everywhere

[Rorschach1]

When I picked up a camper van in Auckland and started driving around New Zealand (and once I'd gotten over my initial terror at driving on the wrong side of the road) I found it was really easy to adapt. I made a game of it for an hour or so, trying to pick an object in the distance when I thought it was 1 km away and watching the odometer to see how close I was.

The only time it nearly caused a problem was one evening when I came to a turn that was marked <<<< 45 <<<< and I instinctively slowed down to about 50. 50 mph, that is.

So if you need a rule of thumb for metric speeds, remember that 45 kph is the speed at which you can negotiate a sharp bend on a wet road in a top-heavy camper van without crapping your pants.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[Blakey Rat]

When visiting other countries switching over to metric for time and distance takes all of a week to get into my head.

No countries use metric time.

Grocery store patrons would take all of a week to need to order 2kg instead of 1lb.

And get four times as much as they wanted?

While I get the point of your post, you're not really demonstrating a good fundamental knowledge of metric here. :)

Re:Metric Everywhere

[Farmer Tim]

I prefer 0.33814023 fluid ounces.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[GNious]

Was easier for the Germans: Stuff that cost 1 Deutchmark suddenly cost 1 Euro.

duck tape

[mikey177]

it can fix anything!

Re:In before...

[Anonymous Coward]

Another preemptive strike: for anyone planning to say Fahrenheit is better because you can think of it as "percentage of warm", I call b/s:

• Warm is subjective - one man's warm is another's cool, and yet another's hot
• You can't argue that the freezing point of water isn't cold - no-one would think of it as "32% of warm"
• Celsius is better because it maps directly to percentage of the temperature difference between phase changes at STP, which is not subjective
• Since we need to deal with temperatures for more than just weather and HVAC, Celsius is better, because it makes sense for lots of things. Cooking a stew? 85 degrees (almost boiling, but not quite). A roast? 160 degrees in a fan-forced oven. Meringue? At least 200 degrees - twice the boiling temperature of water. Soldering? A bit over three times boiling temperature (320 degrees). The Fahrenheit numbers don't make anywhere near as much sense.

Um, no one doesn't

[afabbro]

One has to wonder if this is another imperial/metric snafu.

Uh, why? Yes, NASA made that mistake once, ten+ years ago. Aren't there plenty of other mistake categories that are just as if not more likely?

Re:Um, no one doesn't

[Brett Buck]

Only allowing data to be stored in metric units would likely reduce the likelihood of such a mistake, but it would not eliminate it altogether.

            Unfortunately you are about 50 years too late. In the aerospace industry, virtually ALL the data about most components is already "stored" in conventional units, no Metric. Forcing it to all be converted to Metric just creates the problem you are trying to solve.

      BTW, the MRO incident may have *started* with a units conversion error, but the real flaw was with the lack of due dilligence. The trajectory was diverging for months, and the problem could have been detected and solved easily if the normal checks and balances were applied.

        Brett

Hubble

[MillionthMonkey]

The Hubble misfocusing problem wasn't due to English-metric stuff. A contractor was assembling an optical apparatus and was supposed to be adjusting the focal length to a point inside some hollow cylindrical cap with a hole bored in its center. When adjusting their eyepiece they missed the hole, and centered instead on a shiny point near the edge of the cap that was also reflecting laser light, because the paint had been scratched there. They couldn't get the focus knob to rotate far enough as they would need to get this paint scratch into focus, so they drove out to a hardware store, bought some flat washers, inserted them on the threaded rods holding up the laser, and elevated the focusing section out a bit so they could dial the focus length to properly get the length to the scratch right.

Re:Hubble

[Tablizer]

I also heard that they skipped an integrated (final) test to save money, relying on unit tests instead (like the paint scratch story you give). As we in the software biz know, unit tests are not a true replacement for the real thing. Unit tests merely reduce the problems in the final contraption, not prevent them.

Re:Mock ups

[skirmish666]

Or for that matter did they not think to try testing the actual module on the ground prior to launch?

Not an issue

[pyrrhonist]

One has to wonder if this is another imperial/metric snafu.

Probably not. From the article:

The $27 million, Italian-built observation deck sports the biggest window ever flown in space. In all, there are seven windows that will offer 360-degree views.

The 11 astronauts aboard the shuttle-station complex opened the door Friday to the $380 million Tranquility, also made in Italy for the European Space Agency. The door leading from Tranquility into the observation deck was opened soon afterward, and that's when shuttle pilot Terry Virts and Kay Hire encountered the cover problem.

So, now even submitters aren't reading the article? Damn...

Re:In before...

[Anonymous Coward]

At least 200 degrees - twice the boiling temperature of water

Any thermodynamics guy will tell you that "twice the boiling temperature of water" is 473.15 C.

Problem fixed as of Sunday

[chelberg]

The problem has been fixed, it was interference by some bolts.

"Late Saturday, the space station's commander, Jeffrey Williams, reported that bolts seemed to be causing the interference. He removed all eight bolts, saying the clearance would be tight but that the cover likely would fit. It did, with some coaxing Sunday."

http://apnews.excite.com/article/20100214/D9DS3UOO1.html

Re:Problem fixed as of Sunday

[d474]

"...bolts seemed to be causing the interference. [b]He removed all eight bolts[/b], saying the clearance would be tight but that the cover likely would fit. It did, with some coaxing Sunday."

...And in other news, the International Space Station exploded and fell apart for some [i]unknown reason[/i] today.

Re:Problem fixed as of Sunday

[oljanx]

Awesome. Now I have some ammunition for the next time my wife insists something I've assembled is a "death trap" because there are leftover parts.

Better coverage?

[vlm]

Here's another mystery. Why does the headline link to a story at USATODAY.COM ?

You wanna know whats up with some peculiar internet routing? OK, we get quotes from the guys with hands on the SSH session keyboards right off the NANOG mailing list.

You wanna talk about apple stuff, Woz himself posts here, although all he talks about is his Prius accelerating.

You wanna talk about amateur space exploration, John Carmack himself posts here about his peroxide motors.

You wanna talk about star trek, you get CleverNickName posting, although not since October.

I figure Don Knuth, linus, and RMS probably post here too, although AC.

Here is a very interesting spacecraft story, and we get a hyperlink to USA-freaking-today.com. USA-freaking-today.

Slashdotters you should be ashamed of yourself for slashdot linking to USA-freaking-today, I know theres a genuine NASA console jockey out there whom can post the real goods, AC at least...

This is already a solved problem

[ChrisCampbell47]

Even if this gets modded up to +5, it's going to be buried under a dozen pointless and irrelevant posts about imperial vs. metric ...

From the ISS Flight Director briefing on NASA TV at 1:30pm today:
http://www.space-multimedia.nl.eu.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=5693:sts-130-iss-flight-director-update-fd-7-8&catid=1:latest
[transcribing] "Crew was able to use their eyes and hands and gave good info on interference along with photos, Jeff has had a lot of hands on the hardware and he's given us the best info. His info allowed us to validate what he's seeing with our records on the ground. Actual interference is just a bolthead, that caused us to question our clearance analysis. We went back and looked at it since we don't want clearance issue when we install Cupola on nadir, and found that we have more clearance than originally expected."

From the Flight Day 8 "execute package" sent up around 3pm to the Endeavour astronauts:
( http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/426345main_FD08.pdf )
"Because of your excellent work in checking interferences, we are now comfortable with
proceeding with cupola depress and relocate today!!! Thanks so much!!!"

From the NASA TV schedule, Tuesday:
CUPOLA MLI REMOVAL 10:39 PM EST / 03:39 UTC

After that the windows can be opened, which is what we're all waiting for!

Re:This is already a solved problem

[Gudeldar]

This is Slashdot, the articles are just an excuse to argue about our pet issues. Just look at the article about the proposal to create a national climate service. It had absolutely nothing to do with whether anthropogenic global warming was valid or not yet the vast majority of comments were arguing for or against it.

Cliche mushup

[Tablizer]

"Houston, this is Tranquility Base here, we have a problem."

Actually, when Apollo 11 landed and announced, "Houston, this is Tranquility Base, the Eagle has landed", mission managers were initially confused because they'd never heard the phrase "Tranquility Base" in training. Neal threw that in as a surprise. That teaser, Neal.
     

Re:Cliche mushup

[MichaelSmith]

They should have aborted. He wouldn't think it was so funny after that.

Only the crew had access to the abort button and I doubt any of the crews would have used it if they had a small chance of making a landing. There is some discussion in the ALSJ of what would have happened if the radar altimeter had failed to lock after high gate, preventing automatic throttle control during powered descent. Generally, engineers felt that a landing would be impossible and pilots felt that it was worth a go.

And the engineers are probably right. Pilots tended to fly too high, and too slow while the computer saved fuel for a final deceleration close to the ground. If a pilot stopped the descent at 10000 feet to organize the landing he would run out of fuel.

Inside Scoop

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for Boeing (the main contractors for the ISS) and the problem is that the cover will not retract over one of the CBM (common berthing mechanisms) where they wish to install the Cupola. It is actually no impact to Tranquility which is working wonderfully so far. This issue has at this time already been resolved and the Cupola is being relocated to this area, while PMA-3 (Pressurized Mating Adapter #3) is being relocated to where the Cupola used to be. This was done so that the Cupola could face the earth and create all those fantastic views everybody envisioned from the ISS, while being able to be launched in the shuttle payload bay.

Re:Mock ups

[maxume]

Step 1: Land ISS.
Step 2: Test Fit
Step 3: Spend 20 years and billions of dollars reorbiting ISS.

Re:In before...

[Anonymous Coward]

Celsius? Fahrenheit? Who gives a shit? Both are just based around some physical referents. Neither is inherently "better" than the other. Both are equally descriptive of temperature. The main "selling point" is really the number of other folks using one or the other. For that reason alone, I would choose Celsius since more people use it. (And no, I don't natively use Celsius as I was born in, and live in, the US.) Oh, and both are the same at -40.

Americans are just mental wimps

[bussdriver]

The rest the world has to deal with english, American technical terms, corporations, IP laws, military bases, a hysterical anti-terror crusade and occasionally our messed up measurement system. Yet Americans can't handle having to transition to metric because it would be too hard and too difficult. The greatest generation could have done it, but not the current ones - its beyond their abilities.

Legacy parts? live with it. Eventually, they stop being produced anyhow. It can take decades to move hardware but a ton of stuff can be moved quickly.

Bunch of wimps. I know, I live here.

Re:Screwup, but not an units problem...

[joh]

Every dimension was converted prior to doing anything else. There are 25.4 millimetres to the inch, or 2.54 microns per ten thousandth of an inch. Never, ever had a problem converting.

That's because, ironically, the inch now is DEFINED as being 25.4 millimetres, so a clean and exact conversion is no problem since the inch is already based on metric units. Saying "one inch" is just another way of saying "25.4 millimetres". Other units are less clean and exact.

Re:In before...

[ross.w]

...because the rest of us have ten fingers and count things in base 10.

Re:In before...

[MobyDisk]

The main "selling point" is really the number of other folks using one or the other.

That might be a good way to sell it to the public, but it is not the main benefit of a system. People should understand that a "degree" really does have meaning.

In America, every household appliance seems to use a different unit. My water heater is in BTUs, my electronic devices are in watts, and my air conditioner has na EER which is something stupid like BTUs per Watt - a horrible combination of systems. Even within one fieldd - say, cooking - they use different units. My microwave is in watts while my stove is in BTUs.

If we switched to Metric, this would become much simpler. And then you could compare your lawn mower, your car, your horse, and your TV all using the same units. Suddenly, things that were in the realm of complex math become accessible to the average person,