[X] My Assistant

[djellison]

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

[djellison]

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

[ljk4-1]

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

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.

[djellison]

I don't recall any comments about that,

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