My Chemistry teacher (a big aeronautics fan) mentioned that there exists a photo of a NASA rep handing over A$5 to a Western Australian park ranger (where Skylab fell over) to pay for "littering" in the outback after bits of Skylab landed there.
Speaking about TV's, my uncle's Rank Arena has had a hard life but is still going strong.
About 15 years ago there was a flood at his place and the TV was left floating around downstairs in waist height water. Afterwards they just pulled it open and let it dry. Today it's still in daily use.
Brings to mind an incident with the Porsche 911. Years ago when they first made it and gave it a name, it was designated the 901 (it was chosen from a computer, IIRC).
At the time Peugeot owned the rights to numbering cars with a "0" in the middle, so Porsche had to change it to the 911.
Nobody mentioned what's one of the more interesting things about the Galileo.
Shortly after launching the probe it was discovered that the high-gain antenna which unfurls like an umbrella was jammed, effectively making high-gain transmission impossible.
As a workaround, the craft was reprogrammed to process and compress data a higher level before sending it back to earth via its low-gain antenna (which transmitted at a much slower rate). Receiving stations back at earth were reconfigured to receive a signal 10,000 times less than what the high-gain antenna would have put out.
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My Chemistry teacher (a big aeronautics fan) mentioned that there exists a photo of a NASA rep handing over A$5 to a Western Australian park ranger (where Skylab fell over) to pay for "littering" in the outback after bits of Skylab landed there.
Speaking about TV's, my uncle's Rank Arena has had a hard life but is still going strong.
About 15 years ago there was a flood at his place and the TV was left floating around downstairs in waist height water. Afterwards they just pulled it open and let it dry. Today it's still in daily use.
Brings to mind an incident with the Porsche 911. Years ago when they first made it and gave it a name, it was designated the 901 (it was chosen from a computer, IIRC).
At the time Peugeot owned the rights to numbering cars with a "0" in the middle, so Porsche had to change it to the 911.
And the rest, as it goes, was history.
Nobody mentioned what's one of the more interesting things about the Galileo.
Shortly after launching the probe it was discovered that the high-gain antenna which unfurls like an umbrella was jammed, effectively making high-gain transmission impossible.
As a workaround, the craft was reprogrammed to process and compress data a higher level before sending it back to earth via its low-gain antenna (which transmitted at a much slower rate). Receiving stations back at earth were reconfigured to receive a signal 10,000 times less than what the high-gain antenna would have put out.
As a result, little scientific data was lost.