I believe NASA convention dictates that you have to describe the size as being a dime from X miles away, or the size of X across the continental USA

If you can get 'Tennis Court' and 'Washing Machine' in there, you win a NASA PAO Special Award.

Doug

Copy that.

There is plenty of room to have fun with this.

For example, it could be described as having the same angular diameter as a turkey vulture circling cloverleaf-interchange roadkill in Indianapolis, as seen from a railway boxcar in Terre Haute. Or some such.

Rob:

In the UK, the Standard Measurement of a large area is a 'Wales'. For smaller areas or volumes, such values as a 'Millenium Dome', an 'Isle of Wight' and - most popular of all a 'London Bus' have been used for many years (as have 'Fully Grown African Elephants'). The Millenium Dome measurement is now somewhat out of fashion, so no change there, then!

'Feedback' in New Scientist regularly reports on these Important Matters.

Bob Shaw

Oh - this is all set in stone stuff. The concept of ft or metres doesnt exit, things fit into one of the following sizes

Dime
CD
Washing Machine
Golf Cart
Family Car
SUV
Tennis Court
Football Pitch
Texas
Continental USA.


Any angle has to be express as a range to scoring a hole-in-one or the distance to which a dime would mark out that angle.

Power must be expressed in terms of 100w light bulbs

Anything larger than about 20 miles across must be overlayed onto the USA.

High speeds are expressed as X-minutes to cross the continent.

And then when this stuff is regurgitated by the press - any spacecraft or other piece of hardware is prefixed by it's cost.. (i.e. the $750M dollar this, or the $1.2 billion dollar that)



Doug

You know, Doug, this topic sounds well-suited to the Peter's Evil Overlord List treatment.



Pluto Mission News
New Horizons Tracks an Asteroid
June 15, 2006
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/news_center/news/061506.htm

And how else do you want to relay the size of objects in and about
space to the general public? Meters, kilometers, liters - they mean
nothing to most Americans, and the generally vast sizes of most
space objects are also little more than abstract concepts to the
human mind at best.

There was a recent image of Enceladus compared to Great Britain.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:PIA07724.jpg

I don't recall any comments about that, even though the two objects
have nothing in common except the same solar system.

Perhaps not exactly to your purpose, but this was my comment on the picture earlier this year.

We joked about it at the time, hoping that Enc. didn't actuall crash into the UK any time soon.

All very tongue in cheek ljk - I don't have any real problem with using analogs for scale definition, I just find some of them quite funny.

Doug

My concern was and is the relaying of science to the public. Since the
US space program is supported by the government and taxpayer dollars -
and many of them have poor science backgrounds - the easier they can
be made to understand the significance of spending billions to send
spaceships to distant worlds, the better for science.

Too many people (and I have run into more than my share) think that
all that money spent on space is wasted and should be used to help the
people on Earth. They don't realize or care how relatively little NASA
gets from the government pie. Most other agencies would go through
NASA's annual budget in months.

To keep this on topic, imagine how the average person would and will
likely react to that image of the little planetoid from New Horizons. To
us it is an amazing accomplishment, but to them they'll look at that
fuzzy little blob and say "How many millions did we spend for THAT?!"

I can recall "getting" the true size of Olympus Mons shortly after its
true nature was revealed by Mariner 9 when they compared it to a
map of Arizona, and the darn thing covered the whole state!

http://tes.asu.edu/EDUCATION/activities/95...arth_diags.html

Yes -- the overuse of the "it's like scoring a hole in one from Los Angeles to New York" one causes even my space-ignoramus husband to roll his eyes. And it kind of detracts from really astonishing placements, like Opportunity rolling neatly into Eagle crater -- that really was like a hole in one.

So cool to see those photos from MVIC! Congratulations to the New Horizons team!
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/news_center/news/061506.htm
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/gallery/missionPho...s/asteroid.html

--Emily

You forgot a very important one, though I admit it's outdated and no longer in use. But, from the mid-60s to just a few years ago, any feature on a moon or planet that's in a range of 200 to 300 meters across was referred to as "about the size of the Astrodome."

I think it was only with the demise of the actual Astrodome structure that NASA PAO pulled that particular chimera from their playbooks...

-the other Doug

{apology for going climatological here instead of 'space'}

In the US midwest, hail sizes are usually cited as 'grapefruit' or 'softball' sized for the really big stuff.

I have heard 'peach ' and 'baseball' size used too.

Smaller stuff is commonly described as 'dime' (!) 'nickel' and 'quarter' sized.

Sacagewea sized never came into vogue.

Sometimes a specific dimension is given, if memory serves, 1 inch or 1 and a 1/2 inch being the most common cited.


Uusally neglected in these reports is the wind speed. Worst hail I experienced personally wasn't very big (dime sized) but driven by a 35 MPH horizontal wind. Ouch!


Are hail sizes standardized around the world? I suspect not.



{BTW, local weathercasters really brag up their respective super doppler radars and such. A couple even claim a 'hail mode'. Would such refinements of a radar system be useful for scanning those possible methane storms at the south pole of Titan?}

I've also heard (and seen!) hail described as pea-sized. I'd be willing to bet that this is the size I've seen most frequently, of all the hail I've ever seen falling...

-the other Doug

You missed out the (presumably EU-preferred) Belgium. A unit of measurement equal to 1.469 Waleses, according to this wonderful site.

Andy

I propose a new reference (at least for UMSF'ers) :
Size of the "object" (planet,asteroid,comet) is the same as Earth seen from a distance of : xxx kms
Should be easy to measure. By the way, what would it be for THIS asteroid encounter ?

I think Wales tends to get used more with the 'an area of rainforest the size of XXXX is destroyed every YYYY'



This is wandering WAY off topic - I'll tidy it up later.

Doug

Ah! Right! Do you mean something like 'these are small, but close by, but those are big, and far away' by any chance? You'd really have to get an agreement between all the appropriate authorities - but that would, of course, be an ecumenical matter.

A cup of tea, Father?

Bob Shaw

Don't forget the old "A [insert dime, quarter, etc.] in Tokyo seen from New York." The loved this one in HST materials.

To say nothing of the claims that HST would reveal the "origin of the
Universe" and "Look all the way back in time to the very beginning"
and "Locate your car keys".

Wait a minute...

Re all the "gee golly wow" relative metrics for UMSF in the popular press, and Doug's observation that all such comments are invariably prefaced with project costs...this is precisely why so many people think that the NASA budget is the largest piece of the Federal pie (even larger than DoD!!!), and therefore also why so many are opposed to space exploration!

We need to find an effective way to counter this grossly inaccurate preconception....

Easy! We just explain: if the total federal expenditures for 2005 are compared to the mass of the Earth, then the total expenditures for NASA are smaller than the mass of Europa...

The total federal budget would be a pile of dollar bills X km tall, with the NASA budget being only X metres of that?

Doug

[quote name='djellison' date='Jun 20 2006, 09:10 AM' post='59031']
The total federal budget would be a pile of dollar bills X km tall, with the NASA budget being only X metres of that?
Doug

Just to be consistant to my last quote, I'll say :
Nasa budget seen from a distance of 1 meter = Federal budget seen from a distance of xxx meters

Better make that xxxx, the Federal budget is pretty obscene.

Er... ...NASA's budget is small, but very close, while the Federal budget is big, but far away?

More Tea, Congressman?

Bob Shaw

In 2005, NASA's budget was about 1/148 of total budgeted outlays for the whole federal government. I haven't found the figures for the actual amounts spent that year, however.

Tea? It's coffee or bourbon around here, mate!

(sigh)...I'll second that!!!

What we really need to do is provide at least 10,000 jobs in each & every state directly related to UMSF, and within 10 years we'd have a demand for so many Flagship-class missions that Congressmen & Senators would be serving PIs bourbon!

I keep opening up the new posts in this thread in the misplaced hope that some of them may actually be news about NH, silly me!

I can dig it...but NH has a long, strange journey to complete...you gotta expect a little bit of side chatter...

three pages of this merits a new thread

Good call Alan.


Doug

Ah yes, that gritty documentary about the life of Catholic Priests on a remote Irish Island parish.
I have a friend from Donegal who knows them all .
And as for Bishop Brennan - Hello Len!


Have we had "head of a pin" "candle/mobile phone on the moon" "gnats fart on beta pictoris"...


Nick
"Tea fer everyone - Ahhhh go on, go on, go......"

I like the one about magnetars being able to wreck the credit cards in
everyone's wallet if one passed by Earth from 100,000 miles away.

Of course they should add that such an object would also do a little bit
more than just harm your credit rating.

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/magn...ion_050201.html

We have a winner:

Tracking Earth's Wobbles Down to the Size of a Cell Phone
http://www.agu.org/sci_soc/prrl/prrl0627.html

And they can't just say "ranging in size from that of a sheet of paper down to that of a cell phone", but they ahve to specify the size of the sheet of paper...

Ha! - and I notice they also casually equate a yard with a meter when everybody knows that a meter is one whole cellphone longer than a yard.

Do you think any of them worked at JPL on MCO?

Bob Shaw