
Lots of these drunk no doubt
The second Dragon capsule to visit the International Space Station has landed safely in the Pacific around 250 miles off the California coast and has been picked up by the SpaceX rescue ship. SpaceX Dragon capsule release 'So long, see you later' Over the last week the astronauts on the ISS, including Strummin' Chris …
Actually, the slug is the Imperial unit of mass, and the pound is a unit of force.
(as an EE, I hated Thermodynamics, because all the steam tables were still in Imperial).
But then again, this site routinely speaks of the number of grams to pull a magnet loose, so....
> Actually, the slug is the Imperial unit of mass, and the pound is a unit of force.
I worked on fire-control SW for the USN a couple-three decades back, and in the ballistic calculations the units for air density were slugs per cubic meter. Well, _I_ found that amusing.
slugs/m² make more sense to me, especially in my garden, and quite a few snails as well (I'm not french so I don't eat either of them)
Thanks for the update about slugs, I always associated slugs with units of steam in power generation as in 'supply the turbine with n slugs of steam'.
Mine's the one with a pocket full of slug pellets
and in the ballistic calculations the units for air density were slugs per cubic meter"
imperial/metric mish mash aside, it sounds more like it should be a measure of rate of fire for a minigun or chain gun or some other high rate of fire death dealing machine.
Coat. The full metal jacket, obviously.
" around 3,000 pounds – on earth, that is"
The pound is a unit of mass, not weight.
(I assume the article wasn't making some bizarre monetary valuation.)
Actually, in the old style engineering units popular when the Saturn V was flying, the pound is a unit of force, not mass. [Units of Force, TIme and Length are fundamental in the old engineering system]
The 'slug' is the unit of mass - and it is a derived quantity [the amount of mass that a force of one pound accelerates at one foot per second squared].
This is one reason the MKS [Meter - Kilogram - Second] units are more popular today, even with these new fangled calculators to help out.
There used to be a story about a Swiss Army Knife being used in space, on Victorinox's site, but the page google returns for that doesn't have the content any more. And duct tape was used on the moon (to attach extensions to the wheelarches of a moon buggy)... so spannering in space is probably much like spannering elsewhere, apart from largely missing gravity and air.
Apparently some of the instruments and kit they use on the ISS are kind of fragile. Being launched into space by a rocket can be a little bumpy. I'm not sure that binning the packaging is such a good plan. Sending the item and packaging might be expensive, but it's almost certainly cheaper than sending the item twice.
Given that a lot of the experiments require extreme particle cleanliness, you can expect them to be packaged in at least a single bag. Most of them will actually be double bagged. (And a single PU or PE bag won't exactly break the bank in terms of weight)
Also, what do you think all that food paste, crackers, soup, etc comes packaged in?
In terms of doing laundry in space, they DO wash some stuff themselves, but large objects like coveralls become nearly impossible to wash properly and dry out IIRC. It becomes more economical to just shoot a few fresh ones up every now and then and bring the remainder back down or burn it up in the atmosphere.
Packaging doesn't have to weigh much. Remember that all this is riding on top of a controlled explosion. Sacrificing some volume for protection is probably a very good idea for launch. Thing is, space is at a premium in space (pun intended) so you really want to send the packing back.
Makes sense.. Ever packed boxes for moving? All those old newspapers/folders/plastic bags sure come in handy to secure the fragile stuff.
That ride down is rough. It makes perfect sense to use laundry and empty packaging to fill up the holes to secure and protect the real (valuable!) cargo.
Whilst this is the second CRS mission (Cargo ReSupply), the COTS2 Demo Flight Launched May 2012 and was berthed for 5 days. So it's true that this is the 3rd Dragon to visit the ISS.
See launch list.
On Earth a pound mass is a pound weight. You can use any unit of measure you want, including triple decked buses. Weight is defined as the mass of an object under the acceleration of a gravitational field. The Earth by definition has a gravitational field of 1g (32 feet per second per second or 980 cm / sec^2 in a vacuum. This sometimes varies slightly at various locations). On Mars the gravity is about 38% that of Earth so a triple decked buss mass would weigh 38% of a triple decked bus on Mars. Hope this clears up any misconceptions (assuming there ever were any). NASA recently crashed a couple probes into the moon which mapped the gravitational field of the moon and there are very detailed maps of the gravitational variations of our moon now, but even there, mass is mass, and weight is mass under the effect of gravity.
I was under the impression trash was not sent down, they use the Progress resupply capsules for that as they burn up over the ocean. The stuff sent down was likely items that could be re-used or evaluated as to why they failed. Also science experiments. They do not have a laundry on the ISS.