Tiny Particle Blows Hole In European Satellite's Solar Panel (go.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ABC News: A tiny piece of debris has punched a gaping hole in the solar panel of one of Europe's Earth observation satellites, causing visible damage but not enough to affect its routine operations, the European Space Agency said Wednesday. The unknown particle just a few millimeters big slammed into the back of a solar panel on Copernicus Sentinel-1A on Aug. 23. Using on-board cameras, engineers have determined that the hole is about 40 centimeters (16 inches) in diameter. The European Space Agency said the loss of power caused by the strike is "relatively small" -- less than 5 percent of the wing's usual output. The likelihood of such a strike is calculated at between 1:35 and 1:130 during the satellite's five-year lifetime, said Holger Krag, who heads the agency's space debris office. While the particle probably had a mass of less than 1 gram (0.04 ounces), scientists calculated that it was traveling at up to 40,000 kilometers an hour (24,856 mph) when it hit Sentinel-1A. Space.com has posted a video about the incident, showing images taken before and after the impact.

Comments

Re:Unit conversion not needed

[Ol Olsoc]

or did you want this to be a special elite club for those who have reached metric ascendancy.

You mean everyone except America and two other shit countries? That special elite club?

One problem with a lot of computer type geeks. They seem to masturbate while fantacising about monocuulture.

So what if I know and understand more than one way to measure things? Not a brain cell wasted anywhere. Easier than learning a new language.

Because for all of the haughty pronouncements at base, the metric system is based on being 1 ten millionth of the length measured from the north pole to the equator as measured through Lyons, France.

That's just about as arbitrary a measurement (and inaccurate, by the way) as we can get. And all other measurements stem from that.

And for all of it's supposed superiority, it is being constantly revised. As the artifact method of measurement is retired because of inaccuracy, and we switch to atomic methods of measurement, the arbitrariness is completely revealed.

The meter is the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299 792 458 of a second. This replaced the 1960 convention based on the wavelength of Krypton88 radiation.

Such a absolute logical base kinda makes one quiver, eh? But in the end, either system works, and could be implemented with equal accuracy. And some of us are capable of using either system. Check your superiority complex.