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Martian Meteorite Gets NASA Mars Rover's Attention
coondoggie writes "NASA's Mars rover Opportunity will take a small detour on its current journey to check out what could be a toaster-sized iron-based meteorite that crashed into the Red Planet. NASA scientists called the rock 'Oileán Ruaidh,' which is the Gaelic name for an island off the coast of northwestern Ireland. The rock is about 45 centimeters (18 inches) wide from the angle at which it was first seen on September 16."
If martians use a 18" toaster, this is very scary indeed....
Oileán Ruaidh translates to red island.
"Oileán Ruaidh" is pronounced "red island". FTFY.
A bit like "ay-lan ruah" apparently but yes, let us know if we're supposed to prounce that in an Irish accent, an American accent, or a Martian accent..... ;-)
That's not a meteor, that's a monolith. Kubrick got the scale wrong, apparently.
What a depressingly stupid machine.
Typical, just typical. We spend all this time and money going to an exotic location to see the sights, but once we're there you want to spend all this time looking through the imported kitsch.
Maybe the GREAT ONE lives on Mars.
Toaster-sized at 18''? That's a quite a toaster...
To be fair, the standard SI toaster was defined in 1897, when toasters were a novel luxury item and generally much larger due to the newness of the technology. The original standard toaster, made of solid iridium, is still kept in a vault in Paris.
In 1992, the standard toaster was redefined with dimensions based on the wavelength of a particular spectral line of light given off by a nichrome toaster heating element heated to exactly 1044 K.