New Reg unit?
> The circular device, shaped like a hamburger,
Is that a hamburger in a vacuum? As it was a moon probe, did it contain cheese or plan to get the cheese on arrival?
15 years on, Euroboffins finally work out what it took to send the Huygens Titan probe into such a spin
The European Space Agency’s Huygens probe, the farthest lander to ever make it in the outer solar system, spun wildly in the opposite direction as expected as it descended onto one of Saturn’s moons. Now, scientists have finally figured out what went wrong, 15 years after the probe’s landing. The circular device, shaped like a …
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Sunday 19th January 2020 19:53 GMT Muscleguy
Re: New Reg unit?
It is not usual to eat Lorne Sausage (proper name of the square variety) in place of hamburger buns and don't know anywhere that does this. Even though it might be offered in a bun for convenience of consumption that doesn't make it a hamburger.
As a maker of sausages and black pudding I have a recipe for Lorne sausage but haven't ventured there, yet. Thinking of trying wind dried sausages for a change. if I had more people to feed I would make a haggis for next Saturday. But it's been bought, gluten free. Why I make my own, to ensure they're GF and very tasty.
I make my own GF sausage meat (finer grind than most sausage fillings) and have some GF large sausage rolls with home made genuinely flaky pastry cases. I did 8 turns on the pastry. They are rather good if I say so myself. Pork and fresh sage sausage meat. I have a sage bush.
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Thursday 16th January 2020 01:30 GMT HildyJ
Re: New Reg unit?
But they left out the key to the new unit - the assumed poundage of the beef.
Now since a McDonalds Quarter Pounder (Hamburger Royal to the euros) is 4" in diameter its area is about 12.5 sq in and its weight is about 0.02 lb per sq in.
The hamburger shaped probe was about 106" in diameter, thus about 8825 sq in, thus about 176 pounds.
The unit should read "shaped like a 176 Pound Hamburger Royal."
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Thursday 16th January 2020 17:20 GMT Chris G
Re: New Reg unit?
With or without mayo'?
If it's got cheese, to function fully it must have bacon as a catalyst for the cheese. In the event that cheese collection on arrival was part of the mission would bacon have been included in the mission load or was it assumed that bacon would be naturally occurring with the cheese?
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Wednesday 15th January 2020 09:47 GMT imanidiot
seems sloppy
"The investigation conducted by students and interns at the Polytech Orléans and the French research laboratories LPC2E and PRISME by sending a simulation of the Huygens probe through a windtunnel."
Did nobody bother doing aerodynamic stability testing before sending it on it's way? Seems like a basic test to perform and something that SHOULD have been caught.
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Wednesday 15th January 2020 14:25 GMT ThatOne
Re: seems sloppy
> why the European space program is going so slow
Do you really think the European space program is "going slow"? Even if it was true, the limiting factor would be (as always) money, not the better working conditions of Europeans. You can procrastinate just as well in an US/Chinese working environment.
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Wednesday 15th January 2020 14:48 GMT TRT
Re: seems sloppy
Seems perfectly reasonable to me. It happened in the past, it wasn't catastrophic, it wasn't a problem that needed to be solved before another mission... it was an unexpected and interesting observation of minor significance and thus a project ideal to give to someone who is still a bit wet behind the ears and who could learn a lot from undertaking it.
It happens a lot.
A fictional example:
The principle of generating small amounts of finite improbability by simply hooking the logic circuits of a Bambleweeny 57 Sub-Meson Brain to an atomic vector plotter suspended in a strong Brownian Motion producer (say a nice hot cup of tea) were well understood. It is said that such generators were often used to break the ice at parties by making all the molecules in the hostess's undergarments leap simultaneously one foot to the left, in accordance with the theory of indeterminacy.
Many respectable physicists said that they weren't going to stand for this, partly because it was a debasement of science, but mostly because they didn't get invited to those sorts of parties.
The physicists encountered repeated failures while trying to construct a machine which could generate the infinite improbability field needed to flip a spaceship across the mind-paralyzing distances between the farthest stars and they eventually announced that such a machine was virtually impossible.
Then, one day, a student who had been left to sweep up after a particularly unsuccessful party, found themselves reasoning this way: If, they thought, such a machine is a virtual impossibility, it must logically be a finite improbability. So all they had to do in order to make one is to work out exactly how improbable it is, feed that figure into a finite improbability generator, give it a fresh cup of really hot tea... and turn it on!
They did this and managed to create the long sought after golden Infinite Improbability generator out of thin air. Unfortunately, after they were awarded the Galactic Institute's Prize for Extreme Cleverness, they were lynched by a rampaging mob of respectable physicists who had finally realised that the one thing that they really couldn't stand was "a smart arse."
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Thursday 16th January 2020 13:20 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: seems sloppy
Doing the "impossible" is often a case of really understanding the underlying constraints and seeing the tweak by lateral thinking. Or just being lucky by falling over the right answer when following the wrong path.
"The impossible we can do today - miracles take a little longer"
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Thursday 16th January 2020 14:11 GMT James Hughes 1
Re: seems sloppy
I always look forward to the comments from people who know better than the people who actually designed and built a probe that spend 7 years in space then landed on a moon of another planet.
I guess climate science is also anathema to them, all those know it all scientists, giving it large.
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Thursday 16th January 2020 22:07 GMT Brian Morrison
Re: seems sloppy
You know you're in trouble when you have to measure the warming of your oceans using zettajoules as units. Not to mention having probes that are sampling single measurements in areas of ocean roughly the size of Portugal and you don't actually have full coverage of the oceans.
Science? We've heard of it...
