Discussion for article #230106
This is almost as awesome as Joe Biden!
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Iām wondering how long it will take those guardians of American Exceptionalism to float a conspiracy theory that the pictures are really from a cave/mine somewhere in Europe and not from the first landing on the face of a comet.
This achievement is absolutely mind blowing and inspiring for what we as a species can conceive and accomplish.
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Math is cool.
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FaKE FaKE FakE. JUST LIke THE āMoon LANdIngā, thIS was FILMed ON a HOLLYwoOd sOUNDstage. WHere ARe the PIctures? WhY havE theY all BEEN desTROYed? Where ARE the COMEt ROCK saMPles? IāVE eveN heard OF suSPICIOUS deathS arouND this āLANDingā. EurROPE FAKEd the COMEt LANDIng to WIN the LAND on a COMEt SPACE raCE. WaKE up LIBtards. There IS notHING iN SPACE but HEaven and A FEw LOW orbIT SateLLites whICh are BAsicALLY jUST outsIDE of HEaven. AnD onLY becAUSE gOD wants THEM to be there!!!1!!!one!1!!!
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The amazing thing is that this cost less than ONE day of US defense spendingā¦
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President Obama should come out strongly for the Rosetta mission so Senator Cruz can tweet something moronic in opposition.
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Gravity on the comet is 1/100,000th that of Earth, meaning the washing machine-sized lander weighs just 1 gram (0.04 ounces) there.
Grams are a unit of mass, not weight. The mass of the lander is the same on Earth and on the comet. You can say its weight is 0.00098 newtons, or that its weight on the comet is the same as that of a 1 gram object on earth.
Sorry to be pedantic, itās just that Iāve read a lot of lazy science writing about this landing (looking at you, Bloomberg).
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This is so cool! It really is some next level stuff.
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Ugg have rock envy. ||:ā)
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As a retired scientist I think this mission is utterly awesome. I donāt care what mission scientists wear or what wackos thinkā¦ Just the technical wzardry of landing on a comet is ā¦ well ā¦ as far out of the box as I can conceive of. 4 billion miles, 5 fly-bys to gain speed and a 10 year journey just to arrive near the comet. And then to actually land on a moving 2.5 Km wide target is ā¦wellā¦ Iāve run out of superlatives.
Iām gobsmacked.
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Ugg very much missed lately
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I had heard it explained as ā¦on Earth the device weighed around 200 pounds while on the comet, because of its very much lessened gravity the machine weighted the equivalent of an 8 X 11 sheet of paper. Clumsy and dumbed down for the audience but nonetheless fairly accurate. You said:
āGrams are a unit of mass, not weight.ā
I think you meant to say that Grams are a unit of weight, not mass. Newtons would be a unit of mass. You are quite correct in stating that the mass of the lander has not changed but that the weight has.
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This will go down in history as the Obamacare of comet landings.
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Will the republicans vote 50+ times to deny that it happened?
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More than likely, theyāre a pretty goddamed predictable bunch of loony tunes, Inhofian Ignorance Syndrome affected, nuckle draggin, low life throwbacks to the original pond scum, aināt they?
Commonsense is correct. The units of mass are grams in the Metric system and slugs in the Imperial system.
āWeightā is a force, defined as equal to mass X acceleration (good old F=MA). In this case, the acceleration is gravity. The lower the gravity, the lower the force (or weight.)
The Metric unit of weight/force is the newton. The Imperial unit of weight/force is the pound.
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Pond scum can do a lot of things Inhofe would disagree with ā¦for example it can take CO2 (a major greenhouse gas) out of the air change it structurally into carbohydrates for energy for the plant and structural molecules which it puts into its plant structure thereby cleaning the air we breathe. Ergo, I submit that pond scum is more directly useful to us than is Senator Inhofe (R, OK). All he can do is flap his lips and deny funding for science researchā¦
God Iām glad Iām retired.
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I stand corrected. A gram is a unit of mass.
But, is not mass of something the same everywhere? I know weight changes according to where something isā¦i.e. the further away from the center of Earth we are the less we weigh yet is not mass the same? Does not a unit of something have the same number of atoms in it? This simple concept has always given me headaches. And I was in scienceā¦I did research for 47 years in a medical school.
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Great, thanks Darrtown for helping me learn to love pond scum and not to confuse it with the viscuously useless slime that is James Inhofe.
Not being afflicted by Inhofian Ignorance Syndrom myself, I welcome knew knowledge and try to learn something new everyday. Iām also not afraid of being called out when Iām wrong about something, so I graciously extend my apologies to all pond scum everywhere. Iām sorry if I said anything to offend you dear green algae of my heart.
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