Starship Asterisk*

gvann wrote: ↑Sat Feb 24, 2024 5:36 am The "phone booth sized" reference is likely to be meaningless to most younger people. I work at AT&T and, in our museum, we have a beautiful phone booth from the 1950's with a working pay phone in it. But I have not seen one outside of a museum in decades. We need to come up with an equivalent size reference suitable tor the twenty-first century. Any suggestions?

Rauf wrote: ↑Sat Feb 24, 2024 6:35 am

gvann wrote: ↑Sat Feb 24, 2024 5:36 am The "phone booth sized" reference is likely to be meaningless to most younger people. I work at AT&T and, in our museum, we have a beautiful phone booth from the 1950's with a working pay phone in it. But I have not seen one outside of a museum in decades. We need to come up with an equivalent size reference suitable tor the twenty-first century. Any suggestions?

I think I'm younger than almost all people here in Asterisk, and I know what a phone booth is. Then again, I'm not living in the United States.
But maybe A police box is the same size?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_box

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/malapert#:~:text=Malapert%20and%20Shakespeare wrote: Malapert and Shakespeare

Malapert debuted in English in the 15th century, was a favorite of Shakespeare, and is still used sporadically today. The prefix mal-, meaning "bad" or "badly" and deriving from the Latin malus, is found in many English words, including malevolent and malefactor. The second half of malapert comes from the Middle English apert, meaning "open" or "frank." Apert further derives from the Latin word apertus ("open"), which gave us our noun aperture (meaning "an opening"). Putting the two halves together gives us a word that describes someone or something that is open or honest in a bad way—that is, in a way that is rudely bold. The noun malapert also exists and means "a bold or impudent person."

gvann wrote: ↑Sat Feb 24, 2024 5:36 am The "phone booth sized" reference is likely to be meaningless to most younger people. I work at AT&T and, in our museum, we have a beautiful phone booth from the 1950's with a working pay phone in it. But I have not seen one outside of a museum in decades. We need to come up with an equivalent size reference suitable tor the twenty-first century. Any suggestions?

Chris Peterson wrote: ↑Sat Feb 24, 2024 2:32 pm

gvann wrote: ↑Sat Feb 24, 2024 5:36 am The "phone booth sized" reference is likely to be meaningless to most younger people. I work at AT&T and, in our museum, we have a beautiful phone booth from the 1950's with a working pay phone in it. But I have not seen one outside of a museum in decades. We need to come up with an equivalent size reference suitable tor the twenty-first century. Any suggestions?

An outhouse?

wilddouglascounty wrote: ↑Sat Feb 24, 2024 4:29 pm Seems that the designers of these landers haven't mastered the challenge of fitting that lander into the relatively narrow cylinder of a rocket, maximize the amount of instrumentation you can pack into it, AND do it in such a way as to have a low center of gravity so it can land on uneven surfaces/slopes without tipping over. Having outrigger legs literally tripped this lander up, as it maybe got caught on a boulder, damaging it or causing it to tip, so maybe those aren't the greatest ideas. I wonder if the cylindrical shape would be more stable if the lander was designed to be laying down in the first place? It could be made roll-proof by putting most of the weight on one side, tho maybe that would make for a lopsided launch? At any rate, it seems like lower gravity makes it harder to make a lander stable on an uneven/sloped surface, so they need to have a lower center of gravity/more stable design than they'd need on earth.

The landing came with a little extra dash of flavor as well, the team announced today. While they're still analyzing data, it's pretty clear that Odysseus didn't land vertically as intended, Altemus and Tim Crain, Intuitive Machines co-founder and CTO, said during today's briefing.

During its final descent, Odysseus was supposed to be traveling about 2 mph (3.2 kph) in the vertical direction and 0 mph horizontally. But the data show it was actually moving at roughly 6 mph (10 kph) vertically and 2 mph (3.2 kph) horizontally, Altemus said.

He offered a theory about what happened: Perhaps, while coming down at those slightly off-nominal speeds, Odysseus caught one of its landing legs in a crevice or other piece of lunar terrain.

As a result, "we might have fractured that landing gear and tipped over gently," he said.

wilddouglascounty wrote: ↑Sat Feb 24, 2024 4:29 pm Seems that the designers of these landers haven't mastered the challenge of fitting that lander into the relatively narrow cylinder of a rocket, maximize the amount of instrumentation you can pack into it, AND do it in such a way as to have a low center of gravity so it can land on uneven surfaces/slopes without tipping over. Having outrigger legs literally tripped this lander up, as it maybe got caught on a boulder, damaging it or causing it to tip, so maybe those aren't the greatest ideas. I wonder if the cylindrical shape would be more stable if the lander was designed to be laying down in the first place? It could be made roll-proof by putting most of the weight on one side, tho maybe that would make for a lopsided launch? At any rate, it seems like lower gravity makes it harder to make a lander stable on an uneven/sloped surface, so they need to have a lower center of gravity/more stable design than they'd need on earth.

Dorothea Fox Jakob wrote: ↑Sat Feb 24, 2024 9:48 pm What is the red quarter round in the lower left hand of the 2024 Feb 24 APOD? DFJ in Toronto

It still tipped over wrote: ↑Sat Feb 24, 2024 11:55 pm Clever of Intuitive Machines (a publicly traded company). Their machine tipped over, but here's a photo for the ages where the legs seem to rest on the lunar surface.

Ok, not a problem. But, on a scientifically-minded website, do we have to measure size in units of "phone booths"? Is there an assumption out there that the broader public can't deal with feet, inches or (shock horror) meters and centimeters? The practice seems to be spreading in the press, after years of small satellites being measured in Space News in units of "small fridges" (and even "small fridges found in dorms"), recently I've seen ERS-2 (the one that just reentered over the Pacific) described as "the size of five tigers" and "the weight of an adult rhino". And I'm not even sure humor was involved.

I expect "the size of many many handfuls of adult snails" or "the weight of cart full of bricks" to become SI units anytime.