At 11/15/2002, 09:05 AM, Pat Naughtin wrote:
on 2002-11-14 03.08, Jim Elwell at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:I was quoting Vernon Smith from an interview in a political magazine, so I don't think we can presume that the spacecraft was designed in inch-pound units. At least some of the press releases were clearly done in metric. See
<snip>
> "Another area for experimental economics has to do with NASA. We worked on the
> Cassini mission [which in 1997 sent 800 pounds of scientific instruments on a
> small spacecraft to Saturn to conduct experiments]. We used a trading system
> to allocate the resources that each separate experiment got to use on board.
<snip>
I know that this is a complete red herring but it is interesting that NASA
chose to report the mass of the scientific experiments as "800 pounds".
How long is it going to take for NASA to realise the cost of the Mars
Climate Orbiter?
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/news/press-releases-97/19971015-pr-b.cfm
Also, the craft launched in 1997, which is before the Mars Orbiter fiasco (if memory serves).
Finally, this is an international project. From http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/index.cfm:
"Cassini-Huygens is a cooperative mission of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. Additional information about it is available online at http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C."
Perhaps someone with more patience than me can dig into the project and determine if the spacecraft was designed in metric or inch-pound units.
Jim Elwell, CAMS
Electrical Engineer
Industrial manufacturing manager
Salt Lake City, Utah, USA
www.qsicorp.com
