Curiosity Gearing Up for Drive to Next Study Location 73
Curiosity has spent most of the past 5 weeks running instrument and system checks, but on Friday that is all scheduled to change. The plan is to "drive, drive, drive" until a suitable rock for the rover's first robotic "hands-on" analysis is found, says mission manager Jennifer Trosper. The rover will head to a location about 1,300 feet away labeled "Glenelg," where three different types of rock intersect.
Ah, Ye Olden Times. (Score:5, Funny)
The rover will head to a location about 1,300 feet away...
That be 12/36ths of a cubit, multiplied by four and 1/4 rods, then minus sixteen and 1/8th hogsheads.
Re:Ah, Ye Olden Times. (Score:5, Funny)
When are American's going to grow up?
When you stop abusing the apostrophe.
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We's have's the right's to abu'se whatever's and whoever's we want's!
Re:Ah, Ye Olden Times. (Score:4, Funny)
What is that in a civilized unit of measure?
When are American's going to grow up?
It's Americans, not American's and that's a very good question.
Also, 1m=3.275ft, so 1300 feet = 396.95m or 1.97 furlongs.
Re:Ah, Ye Olden Times. (Score:5, Insightful)
If you are going to do conversions, make sure you include proper rounding to significant digits and avoid false precision.
In other words: 1300 feet = 400 m = 2 furlongs.
Well, those are approximate conversions, but it is an approximate distance as well. This is something I think most "science reporting" does a horrible job of dealing with as well.
As for cubits, those were about 21 inches or about 52 centimeters, which would put the distance at about 800 cubits or about 80 rods. A hoghead is a unit of volume, which isn't applicable.
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If you are going to do conversions, make sure you include proper rounding to significant digits and avoid false precision.
In other words: 1300 feet = 400 m = 2 furlongs.
Well, those are approximate conversions, but it is an approximate distance as well. This is something I think most "science reporting" does a horrible job of dealing with as well.
As for cubits, those were about 21 inches or about 52 centimeters, which would put the distance at about 800 cubits or about 80 rods. A hoghead is a unit of volume, which isn't applicable.
I break out in hives if I use less than two decimal places, you insensitive clod!
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It's roughly two furlongs...
(~400m).
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I love the irony of it. I was having a discussion with a buddy from Montreal and he was railing on the US for not being metric. I was like....bro....you're the only province on the continent that speaks French. I'll spend trillions converting the US to metric if you spend trillions forcing everyone to learn the dominant language, English.
The EU is where most of the imperial unit bitterness comes from, and it has 23 official languages. Oh sweet irony.
Re:Ah, Ye Olden Times. (Score:4, Insightful)
What is that in a civilized unit of measure?
When are American's going to grow up?
A foot is an arbitrary unit of measurement like a metre. What's the difference? Why is one more civilized or grown up than the other?
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Would that be the international foot or the survey foot? Indian or English survey foot? And would it be pre- or post-1959 when the foot was standardized world-wide? Try the same with gallons. Will that be US or Imperial, liquid or dry? For miles, would that be statute miles, nautical miles, US statute miles, UK statute miles, US survey miles (derived from the afore-mentioned survey foot and similar yard)... and it just gets sillier from there. Wait, these differences don't matter? But oh, they do, i
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To be fair, there are really only two SI units from which the rest can be derived.
For example, a kilogram can be defined as the weight of 100 cubic mL of pure distilled water at STP.
A gram is also defined by the weight of one mole of an element (inverse to its atomic weight).
A joule is defined by the energy required to apply a force of one newton for one metre. The list goes on.
A calorie (SI) is defined by the energy required to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water by 1 degree celsius.
A hectare is 10,0
Re:Ah, Ye Olden Times. (Score:5, Insightful)
When you put a rover on Mars, you can pick whatever units you want.
Re:Ah, Ye Olden Times. (Score:5, Funny)
When you put a rover on Mars, you can pick whatever units you want.
That worked out so well for the Mars Climate Orbiter
Re:Ah, Ye Olden Times. (Score:5, Funny)
I know it's a different one, but still oblig:
http://xkcd.com/695/ [xkcd.com]
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Because, in our childhood, we saw this [youtube.com]. And wept.
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Would it make you feel better to know that Sojourner from the Pathfinder mission tried to return to it's base station after we lost contact with it?
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/MRO/news/mro-20070111_prt.htm [nasa.gov]
Wait, no? Why are you sobbing?
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Did samzenpus/slashdot/unnamed_submitter put a rover on Mars? News to me.
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Who paid for that rover? Samzepus, slashdot, unnamed_submitter, me, and if you're American, you. NASA couldn't exist without tax money. WE did indeed put Curiosity on Mars.
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That is like saying you created the iPhone 5, because you hold shares in Apple (or even better you paid for an iPhone 4s, and Apple funded iPhone 5 development using your money)
Re:Ah, Ye Olden Times. (Score:5, Informative)
When you write a slashdot summary about an organization that put a rover on Mars, you can pick whatever units you want.
FTFY. The original press release from NASA contained the both the metric units and the imperial ones (Didn't specify the subset but I am going to assume British feet.)
The article linked in the summary only presents the distance in metric units. The summary is either not a summary of the article or the one who wrote the summary took the liberty to convert the liberty to convert the units with some rounding.
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NASA has. They chose metric.
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They did: They picked the metric system, which they have been using since 1990 and exclusively since 2007.
The submitter is the one who used the deprecated regional standard.
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The rover will head to a location about 1,300 feet away...
That be 12/36ths of a cubit, multiplied by four and 1/4 rods, then minus sixteen and 1/8th hogsheads.
Guess I missed the joke since Hogshead is more of a volume measurement. Here's the Wikipedia explanation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hogshead [wikipedia.org]
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Guess I missed the joke
Yep.
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While 85% of the world drives on the left
There must be a lot of very drunk or highly incompetent drivers in the rest of the world then.
It's in Britain that we drive on the left.
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In terms of population, around 1/3rd of the world drives on the left (side of the road, i.e. right-hand drive), and 2/3rds on the right (side of the road, i.e. left-hand drive)
India alone, with well over a billion people, drives on the left. Add to that Japan, much of SE Asia, Australia and (as you mention) NZ. And no doubt some other ones I'm not aware of. It's by no means just one or two holdouts (where as the metric vs. imperial situation is really just the US and a couple of non-factor countries, versus
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Geographical coverage is more important for this versus population. It's a matter of where you are. Let's say that something the size of, say, Germany had 2/3 the population of the world (doable but would be impractical) and drove on the left. The rest of the earth drives on the right. Would you say, well, 2/3 of the earth drives on the left?
The nice thing about left hand drive is you can operate the gear stick with the left hand. Unfortunately, they still operate on the idea that the back brake is th
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A meter is just a little over three feet. 5280 feet is a mile, a km is .6 of a mile. The math is easy, especially if you don't need much precision.
Crushing versus that poking thing. (Score:3)
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This is the poking robot. Do not listen to the crushing robot. He is defective. Crushing is the answer!
Do you mean to say that Curiosity has pushed grandma to the bottom of the stairs?
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The complete crushing plants are exported to Russia, Mongolia, middle Asia, Africa and other regions around the world.
Do you set up installations on Mars too?
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Lazy scientists (Score:3, Funny)
Taking a car when they could have just walked 400 meters. Don't they think of the environment?
Rover control interface is online! (Score:1)
Nasa's Curiosity Monster Truck Rover has an online control simulator! [imonstertruckgames.com] It takes about 8 minutes to actually work though.
A road trip on Mars... (Score:1)
Too bad the rover doesn't have external speakers. Then the public could fight over what song is playing over the radio.
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Shotgun!
what hands? (Score:4, Funny)
I don't see hands on the ends of those robot arms. I don't know what they are talking about.
The robot devil had to sign a deal with Fry to get hands.
1300 feet to SI (Score:1, Informative)
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Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Glenelg? (Score:4, Funny)
Curiosity will certainly end up in a palindrome loop!
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What's with all the Australian place names being used?
The landing site was adjacent to a point they are calling Goulburn (a town in south-eastern New South Wales [goo.gl]).
Glenelg [goo.gl] is a suburb (and rather nice beach) in Adelaide, South Australia. As far as my Google-fu can determine, it is the only location named as such on earth.
There's also a few other names being used by NASA to refer to nearby points of interest that seem to have Australian origin. My only guess is that it has something to do with the fact that t
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Ah, thanks. My Google-fu is lacking it appears. Actually that's one issue with the way that search engines geolocate you and present 'relevant' results these days - it makes looking for locations named the same as some local location difficult!
The difference between traveling on Curiosity (Score:2)
Curiosity
is almost the worst mean of transportation! Almost, because the difference between traveling on Curiosity and
airplane is that you won't have to get a prostate check before boarding Curiosity.
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If Curiosity encountered a prostate on Mars, I'm sure it'd want to investigate it with its laser, and possibly drill.