Starship Asterisk*

Dustdreamer wrote:

geckzilla wrote:
Please stop anthropomorphizing spacecraft and using feminine pronouns. They're not women.

True, they are not women, they are not even alive. However, they are either ships or aircraft and both of those are, by tradition, commonly referred to with the feminine pronoun in English.

Planets, stars, galaxies, moons and even the falling rocks variously termed "Asteroids", "Minor Planets" or "Dwarf Planets" are also feminine, even those, such as Jupiter, whose names are most certainly male. Even countries and cities can be female.

http://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2010/12/ships.html wrote:
<<The personification of nonliving nouns (e.g., ships or nations) as “she” has fallen out of common usage. It’s now generally considered quaint or poetic. The Chicago Manual of Style (16th edition), as well as the style books of the Associated Press and the New York Times, recommend using “it” or “its” to refer to ships. In 2002, Lloyd’s List, the 276-year-old London-based shipping newspaper, officially dropped the gender personification and now refers to ships with the pronouns “it” and “its” instead of “she” and “her.”>>

Dustdreamer wrote: Newby could be retrieved. All we need to do is slingshot her past her next target so she falls towards another falling rock then bounce her from rock to rock until one of the gravitational slingshots gives her an Earthward trajectory.
It might take a few centuries, and it would require us to find suitable rocks and ice-balls in appropriate orbits but those JPL guys are very, very good at this sort of stuff.
They got Voyager to Neptune using this technique, bouncing Newby around should be easy for them.

Chris is going to give us pages of why this is a ludicrous idea. :)

neufer wrote:

Dustdreamer wrote:

geckzilla wrote:
Please stop anthropomorphizing spacecraft and using feminine pronouns. They're not women.

True, they are not women, they are not even alive. However, they are either ships or aircraft and both of those are, by tradition, commonly referred to with the feminine pronoun in English.

Planets, stars, galaxies, moons and even the falling rocks variously termed "Asteroids", "Minor Planets" or "Dwarf Planets" are also feminine, even those, such as Jupiter, whose names are most certainly male. Even countries and cities can be female.

http://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2010/12/ships.html wrote:
<<The personification of nonliving nouns (e.g., ships or nations) as “she” has fallen out of common usage. It’s now generally considered quaint or poetic. The Chicago Manual of Style (16th edition), as well as the style books of the Associated Press and the New York Times, recommend using “it” or “its” to refer to ships. In 2002, Lloyd’s List, the 276-year-old London-based shipping newspaper, officially dropped the gender personification and now refers to ships with the pronouns “it” and “its” instead of “she” and “her.”>>

Chris Peterson wrote:

Dustdreamer wrote: Newby could be retrieved. All we need to do is slingshot her past her next target so she falls towards another falling rock then bounce her from rock to rock until one of the gravitational slingshots gives her an Earthward trajectory.
It might take a few centuries, and it would require us to find suitable rocks and ice-balls in appropriate orbits but those JPL guys are very, very good at this sort of stuff.
They got Voyager to Neptune using this technique, bouncing Newby around should be easy for them.

Chris is going to give us pages of why this is a ludicrous idea.

New Horizons is currently moving away from the Sun at 14.5 km/s, in a part of the Solar System with a solar escape velocity of 6.7 km/s. There's no body out there massive enough to do more than slightly deflect the hyperbolic (nearly linear) orbit it's currently in.

Guest wrote:

Chris Peterson wrote:
New Horizons is currently moving away from the Sun at 14.5 km/s, in a part of the Solar System with a solar escape velocity of 6.7 km/s. There's no body out there massive enough to do more than slightly deflect the hyperbolic (nearly linear) orbit it's currently in.

Given that its velocity exceeds escape velocity, is it really correct to describe New Horizons as being in 'orbit'? Is there some nuance to the term orbit that I am missing?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbit wrote:
<<An orbit is the gravitationally curved path of an object about a point in space, for example the orbit of a planet about a star or a natural satellite around a planet. Orbits of planets are typically elliptical, and the central mass being orbited is at a focal point of the ellipse. Isaac Newton demonstrated that Kepler's laws were derivable from his theory of gravitation and that, in general, the orbits of bodies subject to gravity were conic sections.>>

Guest wrote:

Chris Peterson wrote:Given that its velocity exceeds escape velocity, is it really correct to describe New Horizons as being in 'orbit'? Is there some nuance to the term orbit that I am missing? No criticism intended, just asking...

Dan wrote:Hello All...I'm just curious why Cassini has to be directed into the planet in September, rather than allowing it to continue gathering data from the planet? If the power source of the craft is depleted, why not just send it out into open space to travel for ever??

Just curious..

Chris Peterson wrote:

Dan wrote:
Hello All...I'm just curious why Cassini has to be directed into the planet in September, rather than allowing it to continue gathering data from the planet? If the power source of the craft is depleted, why not just send it out into open space to travel for ever??

Just curious..

Cassini is gravitationally bound to Saturn. It can't be "sent out into open space" without using a big rocket engine and a huge amount of fuel- probably more than was used in its original launch from Earth. It can either be left in orbit, where it will eventually be perturbed and possibly hit a moon, or it can be allowed to fall while some control remains.

neufer wrote:
<<If Cassini was in a circular orbit of velocity V_o then to be "sent out into open space" requires a velocity impulse of only [sqrt(2)-1]V_o as compared with a velocity impulse of -V_o in order to crash into Saturn.

For a Saturn crash to require a smaller velocity impulse (than the full escape option) requires the elliptical orbit aposaturn to be about 31/3 (= 2/[3-sqrt(8)] - 1) times perisaturn! Fortunately, Cassini is almost always this sort of a highly elliptical orbit. Hence, it roughly just as easy to crash into Saturn as to escape it...but pre-crash perisaturn orbits close to the rings are much more scientifically useful:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassini%E ... retirement

geckzilla wrote:

Dustdreamer wrote:It's a thing. Don't blame me for it, I only live here I didn't design the language. English, she is a law unto herself.

You're the only one here doing it. It's long been officially deprecated. Stop.

Dustdreamer wrote:

geckzilla wrote:

Dustdreamer wrote:It's a thing. Don't blame me for it, I only live here I didn't design the language. English, she is a law unto herself.

You're the only one here doing it. It's long been officially deprecated. Stop.

The practice has been "officially deprecated" by one US college and one US newspaper.

Manned Space Program vs. Human Space Program:

All references referring to the space program should be non-gender specific (e.g. human, piloted, un-piloted, robotic). The exception to the rule is when referring to the Manned Spacecraft Center, the predecessor to the Johnson Space Center in Houston, or any other official program name or title that included "manned" (e.g. Associate Administrator for Manned Spaceflight).