Forums » Off-Topic

errata

Aug 24, 2006 upper case link
Aug 24, 2006 moldyman link
Damn, you beat me to the post by a mere minute...

Anyway, it's all arbitrary. The scientific community just stroked their collective egos just now by creating a "new set of rules".
Aug 24, 2006 Scuba Steve 9.0 link
What in the heck are all those lines here and there for? MY ALIEN BRAIN EL NO COMPREHENDE.
Aug 25, 2006 Suicidal Lemming link
Poor pluto being downgraded to a dwarf planet.
Aug 25, 2006 upper case link
scuba... gosh... you fly a space ship every day and you can't even recognize sol and it's relative distance to 14 pulsars?

it's a map!

the humans are depicted in front of a diagram of the space ship to show a relative size of ourselves in comparaison to the space ship. the two circles on the top left are hydrogene atoms in it's spin up/spin down state, to give a clue of measurement units being used on the plaque.

and for those thinking about the voyager space ships, this isn't it! that plaque was onboard the pioneer ship. voyagers had lp audio/video gold-plated records with instruction on how to play them, and a needle to do so.
Aug 25, 2006 toshiro link
I didn't know the plaque looked like that. Yay, the first thing alien organisms are going to see from our planet is porn. There could be worse things.
Aug 25, 2006 Scuba Steve 9.0 link
What, are you crazy? I don't even know where Sol is, much less 14 pulsars near it!
Aug 25, 2006 upper case link
a complete description of the plaque: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_plaque

and the actual plaque:

Aug 27, 2006 mr bean link
do we still know where that ship is?
Aug 27, 2006 upper case link
according to nasa's pioneer page ( http://spaceprojects.arc.nasa.gov/Space_Projects/pioneer/PNStat.html )

"Pioneer 10 distance from Sun : 91.160 AU Speed relative to the Sun: 12.154 km/sec (27,188mph) Distance from Earth: 13.77 billion kilometers (8.54 billion miles) (Round-trip Light Time = 25 hours 26 minutes)  "

"The power source on Pioneer 10 finally degraded to the point where the signal to Earth dropped below the threshold for detection in its latest contact attempt on 7 February 2003. No more attempts at contact are planned at this time. The previous three contacts had very faint signals with no telemetry received. Pioneer's last, very weak signal was received on 23 January 2003. The last time a Pioneer 10 contact returned telemetry data was on 27 April 2002."

"One final attempt was made to locate Pioneer's 10 signal on March 3-5, 2006 but failed to receive a response detection of a carrier signal from the spacecraft..  "

**any capitalisation is an ill-effect of copy-pasting

edit: one nice thing about that web site is that you can see control applications were written (rewritten) on mac os 7!