On 11/12/06, Andrew Lentvorski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Quick: what's .375 doubled? Now what's 3/8 doubled? Which one did you do faster?
About the same. What is your point? [snip] > Losing a spacecraft due to
the use of English units for thrust is outrageous.
That is a dumb statement. I suppose you are referring to: 1-Oct-1999 - What if Flying to Mars was Like Driving to Chicago? (space.com) By now, it's pretty well known what went wrong in the Mars Climate Orbiter Mission: Lockheed gave NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory a computer file with units in the old English notation, and the JPL assumed they were metric. In this case, it was maneuvering data, defining how much thrust was needed out of the maneuvering jets at certain times. The English unit for thrust is called a pound-per-second, the metric unit is called a Newton. The problem is not "units" the problem is the assumption that each crew was using the same units. The outrage is that no one checked. BobLQ -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
