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NASA Spacecraft Confirms Successful Flyby of Distant Solar System Object (theverge.com)
NASA received a critical signal from one of its most distant spacecrafts this morning, confirming that the vehicle has just flown by a tiny frozen rock in the outer reaches of the Solar System. From a report: That space probe, named New Horizons, has now made history. Currently located more than 4 billion miles from Earth, the spacecraft has now whizzed past the most distant -- and most primitive -- object that's ever been visited by humanity. "We have a healthy spacecraft," Alice Bowman, the mission operations manager for the New Horizons mission, said after confirming the feat. "We've just accomplished the most distant flyby."
"It's a flyby that's been over a decade in the making, too. Launched in 2006, New Horizons famously passed by Pluto in 2015, becoming the first mission to ever reach the dwarf planet. But ever since that flyby, New Horizons has kept on speeding through the Solar System, in order to meet up with this new object, nicknamed Ultima Thule.
"It's a flyby that's been over a decade in the making, too. Launched in 2006, New Horizons famously passed by Pluto in 2015, becoming the first mission to ever reach the dwarf planet. But ever since that flyby, New Horizons has kept on speeding through the Solar System, in order to meet up with this new object, nicknamed Ultima Thule.
It's a 32-bit number.
I assumed that the fact that it has feet means that the spacecraft is of a "Voltron"-type design.
I guess that's better than a Guntron design...
Musk needs a safer hobby than Twitter. Fire juggling? Cage fighting? Solo hot air balloon trips?
When talking about interplanetary distances, it is usually more intuitive to use AUs (the distance from the sun to the earth).
4000000000 miles = 43 AU. About 6 light-hours.
Astronomical Unit
Pathetic: there've been miles at least since the Roman Empire. Who 'Anglo-Saxon' over age 30 knows what a Revolutionary 'kilometre' is? Mugs like you have lost the inches in your own dainty thumbs and the feet attached to your Lycra-enhanced legs.
One small step for....
Pics or it didn't happen... ;)
Any more objects that it might be headed towards?
I hate fat people.
In what sense is it primitive? Still running a 32bit 2.4 kernel? Did the probe get showered with spears and arrows as it flew past?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
But they confirmed the "feet"........
So they've found life in the Kuiper belt. And it even has feet. What a start to the new year.
FIY I'm Canadian, one of the few countries on the planet that has to deal with both Imperial and Metric units in every aspect of our lives, every day. Basically everything around us that uses a measurement system of any kind has either both or only one.
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Max value of 32 bit integer is only 2,147,483,647 (2.1 billion).
Max value of 64 bit integer is 9,223,372,036,854,775,807 (9.2 quintillion).
Hopefully no overflows :-0
Max value of 32 bit signed integer is only 2,147,483,647 (2.1 billion).
Max value of 64 bit signed integer is 9,223,372,036,854,775,807 (9.2 quintillion).
Hopefully no overflows :-0
FTFY.
And unsigned 32-bit int is 4294967295; unsigned 64-bit int is 18446744073709551615
Max value of 32 bit integer is only 2,147,483,647 (2.1 billion).
One would presume that distances are measured unsigned not signed, which has the range of 0-4294967296.
But anyhow, if I remember correctly, NASA has historically used BCD notation, which has no logical limit on size or precision, only physical and asserted limits. (And metric, except in press releases.)
Looks like you've never spent time to develop an intuition for how far away the sun is. It's a one-time investment, and then you can understand every distance given in AU.
This link is stolen from an AC that responded to you, inexplicably down-modded despite having very useful information:
Ultima Thule pictures
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It isn't the federal government out of control, it is the rest of us. Any threat to SS and Medicare (the biggest part of the budget) is met with angst, and threats of revenge. Americans also like the rest of the world not being run by those nice Chinese and Russians. How about that farm bill, gotta fund those family farms even if most of it goes to corporate farms.
To make matters worse, the Republicans decided to pay off their corporate masters and gave them a tax decrease which they promptly spent on share buy-backs so the long suffering corporate officers were not inconvenienced. Trillion dollar deficits are now built in.
When the Fed decides to reel in the easy money policy, Bozo the Wonder President decides it is the reason the stock market stinks rather than the 19th century tariffs as he tries to turn the 21st century economy into the 19th century's. And yet, his "base" thinks he's the Second Coming for screwing those naughty immigrants who want to come here and work and help replace the Americans who are no longer being born at replacement rate. And, in a world where understanding other cultures is necessary to have any sort of decent exports, Bozo and his base have decided they don't need no stinking culture.
If you want to include modern miles and Roman miles under the same heading then you're talking relative errors of 9%. That's not exactly suited for engineering. Whereas the error from the original definition of the kilometre (one forty-thousandth of the circumference of the Earth) to the modern one is 0.08%.
But if you want to ditch the historical perspective and just think about the modern units, a /. reader should be able to convert between miles and kilometres really easily. The conversion factor of 1.609 is very close to the golden ratio, so you can use consecutive Fibonacci numbers for conversion.
The probe is going about 8 miles per second. The object is about 20 miles across. That means it passes the distance of the object's size in less than 3 seconds.
At closest approach, the object appears roughly the apparent size of our moon from Earth according to one article.
Thus, if you were sitting on the probe, and put your thumb out and up next to Thule, held it steady and closed one eye, your thumb would cover the distance of it in about 3 seconds.
It also means the probe only has a minute or two to use its instruments near closest approach. The fly-by speed is almost comparable to watching a high plane fly overhead.
Being the probe has to swivel its entire body to aim each instrument, that's a lot of dancing in a short time slot. (Some instruments point the same direction to save swiveling.) Further, the exact position wasn't precisely known ahead of time, so many instruments and cameras have to scan an area larger than the target to be sure they cover it.
Operators sent a "timing correction" to the probe a couple of days ago they said was a 2-second shift, applying updated navigation info using recent probe photos (when Thule was still a spec). I can see why 2 seconds makes a difference at that speed.
Table-ized A.I.
I did not say "the only country" I said "one of the few countries". The UK was a given.
But the last time I saw things from a USA grocery store, pratically everything was in ounces and pounds, not grams and kilograms.
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I (as european) find it much easier to convert from metric to imperial than the other way around.
For example, a mile is about 1.6km. Multiplying by 1.6 is much easier than dividing by 1.6.
A pound is close enough to our traditional 'metric' pound (1/2 kg) to not cause any significant confusion (btw, we are legally not allowed to use the word 'pound' in my country). A gallon is close to 4L (3.8), and a quart is roughly a liter. From Celsius to Fahrenheit is pretty easy too, once you have one or two 'setpoints' and round 9/5 to 2. The other way around is way more confusing. Also, in a way Fahrenheit is more intuitive - 100 is hot and below 50 is cold, and has a better resolution (0.5C difference is noticeable but weather reports will round to integer numbers).
It got to the point where at work i occasionally and by accident use inches instead of cm. My co-worker is nerdy enough to have no problem with it. 'About 5 inch' is just way more practical than '12 or 13cm'. With any construction, inches are just practical and cm are often overly precise and harder to `guess` correctly.
Having had to work with both units, i can totally see why the USA sticks to imperial units. Simply put, they are more intuitive and the scale is usually more practical for the human mind to parse. Metric is too 'artificial' and misses practical units like feet, ounce, pint, pound and gallon. Humans are just not good with (large) numbers, and changing to an appropriate unit fixes this.
A glitch a day keeps the bugs away.
The country that built the legs of the lunar lander and the arm of the space shuttle.
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Sorry to steal your link man, at the time I posted you were at -1. Glad to see you getting the recognition you deserve...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Bah! I walked that far to school and back, in the snow, up hill both ways.
Now get off my lawn!
A lot of them, I imagine. Kessel is rather small, so the runs there can't be very long.
Ezekiel 23:20
We American scientists and engineers deal with both daily as well. If nothing else from the slower-thinking denizens of Slashdot complaining about English units...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
"beer is sold in pints" Even Pippin was surprised by this.
Cue the "NASA hasn't put a man on Mars so it's useless" wailing.
Basically everything around us that uses a measurement system of any kind has either both or only one.
This is true for most countries in the world, including the US. Think about it...
For lengths, Imperial can be a real bitch. Adding 5-3/8" to 3-7/16" is a heck of a lot more complicated than metric.
And then there's the mix between different base systems. 12 inches to a foot, but the inch itself is divided by 8/16/32/64 instead of by 12 like the foot is. Then there's three feet to a yard, and 32*5*11 yards to a mile, 16 ounces to a pound, and 14 pounds to a stone.
Then there's the money with 1, 5, 10 and 25 cents, but 1, 5, 10, 20 dollars. Why is there a 25 cent coin but not a 25 dollar bill?
I think Americans like being confused so they have an excuse for being bad at maths and needing a calculator for everything.
Then you didn't look very closely. Almost everything is labeled in both pounds/ounces and grams/kilograms.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
What is that in Kessel runs?
The Kessel run can be completed in 12 parsecs. A parsec is 1/(sin(1/3600)) = 206265 AUs.
So 43 AU would be 43/(206265*12) = 0.000017 Kessel runs.
If you don't know when to use signed vs unsigned variables, you do not belong on Slashdot.
If you think that being able to look up the ranges of valid signed/unsigned values for a given x-bit number, you do not belong on Slashdot.
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Except 20C is 68F, not 70F. A pretty significant difference in comfort when setting the furnace's thermostat (at least to my wife).
The U.S.A. is officially a non-metric country. Canada and the UK are officially metric countries but have to deal with imperial measurements every day. Example: my grocery flyers are full of imperial-only numbers... but I grew up learning metric. Why the fuck are the numbers advertised in the flyers not all 100% metric? That's the difference between the USA and Canada/UK.
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Still, the Canadian legs of the lunar lander touched the moon before Neil Armstrong.
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The Fed in this context is the Federal Reserve Board, not Congress. So you're way off base.
1 AU is roughly 389x the distance to the Moon. 3,735x the circumference of the Earth. Or about 31 million times the distance to the horizon when standing at sea level.
In other words, so much larger than anything you have any frame of reference to, that you have no possibility of truly understanding it in those terms - the human brain starts having real problems accurately visualizing even a 1000x difference in scale, most people have trouble with even 100x.
If you want to visualize anything in astronomy, you need to develop a completely different frame of reference to do so. And the distance to the sun is one of the most natural (and thus, intuitive) reference frames for us to use to visualize distances in the solar system.
As someone once said - "The nipple is the only truly intuitive user interface, everything else is learned". By the same token any "intuitive" tool for thought must actually be learned - "inuitive" just means that it's as relevant as possible to your realm of experience. For distances in space, the distance to our sun is the only such thing on remotely the right scale.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Lengths are a whole separate issue - you can buy decimal-inch rulers, just like you can buy fractional-centimeter rulers. It's just that they're more difficult to find than "normal" versions.
Fractional rulers are very useful when building things by hand, where you very often end up wanting to divide lengths in half. It does however make both calculations and comparison of different sub-unit lengths more difficult. But most people these days don't build things, at least not often enough to learn how to use a fractional ruler well. But we keep fractional-inch rulers, because that's the way most people have done it (also, subdividing a decimal ruler to be easy to read is a challenge)
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
If you want intuitive and practical why not go back a little further? A hand is more practical for most things than either an inch or a foot, and actually maps more gracefully to metric than its own system: 1 hand = 4 inches = 1/3 foot =~ 10cm
I also prefer cm to inches for the same reason you like Farenheit for temperature: A half an inch difference is noticeable (visually & functionally) in most contexts, which means a whole lot of inch measurements need to be fractional, while you can usually design things to nice clean multiples of 1cm without significant compromise. (and can easily use mm instead, if greater precision is needed)
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.