I wish we could just all go to the MKS system and stick with it. Meters, kilograms, and seconds. And please can we straighten out if we mean years or yards, seconds or meters? I can see mixing up yards and meters, but time and distance seem more fundamentally different. I still can't figure out if the Soyuz really fires the soft landing rockets 1 second off the ground or 1 meter off the ground, which would be much less than a second. I find articles that say at 2 seconds before impact the rockets fire 0.8 meter above the ground and slow it to 1.5 m/s. That just makes no sense. It would go 0.8 meters in less than a second at 1.5 m/s. What happens the other half of the time?
Anyway, it doesn't matter because skidding for 25 *units*
But they made it back intact and I trust they all passed their physicals. Scott Kelly is probably nearly back to Houston already since he was due to fly straight back there after the flight surgeon cleared him. When the rescue crews extracted them from the capsule it was in the 20s, which I assume is degrees F in that article since 20s C wouldn't be so snowy. Texas is nice today, in the 70s. Fahrenheit. So welcome home, CDR Kelly!
MKS? That's a bit old-school isn't it? The rest of the world uses SI.
ReplyDeleteYou're right. SI is the official name of what was originally MKS. I was just being specific that I meant meters, kilograms, and seconds with the implied cadre of amperes, degrees kelvin, candela, and moles. Just not the centimeter, gram, second thing that I still see sometimes and definitely not the inches, pounds, seconds, degrees Fahrenheit they use on the American news. Pounds isn't even mass! It should at least be inches, slugs and seconds but absolutely NOBODY uses slugs. It makes me cringe to hear them describe the size of things on the International Space Station in pounds.
ReplyDeleteSorry if I came across as a bit narky, I must have been in a picky mood yesterday.
ReplyDeleteSlugs, eh? I always thought that "pounds" was mass and "pounds force" was force. You learn something every day. But I haven't had to deal with imperial units since 1970, when Australia went metric.
Thanks for an entertaining blog!