Please don't confuse NASA-Houston and NASA public information releases (mostly non-SI) with NASA-JPL (mostly SI in design and operations internally)!
---- Original message ---- >Date: Sat, 19 Mar 2011 07:10:52 -0400 >From: "Kilopascal" <[email protected]> >Subject: [USMA:50101] NASA screws up dual labelling >To: <[email protected]>, "U.S. Metric Association" <[email protected]> > > It is crap like this comming out of NASA that is the > main reason they are in serious trouble and > struggling to survive. The best thing to do is to > pressure your Congressman to stop funding NASA and > instead fund those private space industries (the > ones that use metric in their internal designs) and > hopefully with NASA gone so will go their > anti-metric pollution. > > [USMA:50101] NASA screws up dual labelling > > Bill Hooper > Fri, 18 Mar 2011 18:31:57 -0700 > > A recent announcement from NASA botches an attempt to show a distance in > kilometres and miles, then goes on to give other data in miles only. Below, > for > your interest, is an excerpt from the announcement followed by my criticism > and > analysis of the situation, which I sent to NASA. > > > Bill Hooper > Member, US Metric Association > www.metric.org > > > ============================================== > On Mar 18 , at 12:33 AM, NASA News Services wrote: > > > Celebrating Mercury Orbit > > Wed, 16 Mar 2011 23:00:00 -0500 > > > > ... The orbit insertion will place the spacecraft into a 12-hour orbit about > > Mercury with a 200 124 mile (STET) minimum altitude. MESSENGER will be 28.67 > > million miles from the sun and 96.35 million miles from Earth. Credit: > > NASA/Paul E. Alers > > > > There are two problems with your report the in Messenger spacecraft's orbit > around Mercury: > > (1) It appears that you meant to write "200 km / 124 miles" but you neglected > to enter the kilometres symbol after "200" Also, there was no separator > between > the two numbers to indicate that it was "one or the other". > > Therefore, it appears that you have announced that the minimum altitude was > "two hundred thousand, one hundred and twentya**four miles" (200,124 miles)! > Although Americans generally write that with the comma, many people use a > space > instead of a comma (200 124 miles), and most people recognize the space as > being just a simple separator in a SINGLE, long number. > > and > > (2) While we are on the subject of units: Why is it so hard to tell us the > distance to the sun and the distance to the earth in kilometres in addition to > (or, better yet, in place of) the mile figure? The distance to sun and earth, > respectively, can easily be written "46.13 million km" and "155.0 million km". > Or one could take advantage of the simplicity of the SI metric system and > report it as "46.13 Gm" and "155.0 Gm" (The symbol "Gm" stands for gigametres, > where a gigmetre is one million kilometres.) > > While I admit that there are many people "out there" who are not sufficiently > familiar with metric to understand what kilometre distance are (or megametre > or > gigametre distances), it is also true that there ALSO are many people "out > there" who DO understand (and prefer) the simplicity of the SI system. You owe > it to those people, too, to express your data in ways that they understand and > prefer.
