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I bet you didnt know that
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Not because of the gravitational pull. The ISS is in low earth orbit so the largest effect is the Earth's atmosphere. Any gravitational effect on orbital decay would be relativistic and negligible for planets and satellites.
Anyway, the ISS's mean orbit height (mean because the orbit is slightly elliptic) changes a lot. It's often boosted back up to higher otbits. See the graph of its mean orbital height over 2014--2015. You can clearly see it falling undisturbed for a large period.
I'm retiring. I can't get anything right anymore. Time for the dementia meds.
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I'm retiring. I can't get anything right anymore. Time for the dementia meds.
No, you were right. It decays significantly but it's because of atmosphere. And it's often pushed back up because otherwise, after what 19 years, it wouldn't be in orbit at all anymore with the rate the orbit decays at. :P0 -
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Space travel has actually moved at a much slower rate than nearly every other industry since the 70's believe it or not. We haven't left low earth orbit in decades. Compare the advances we've made in things like the cars we drive......and then think about what we are doing in space. We are doing the same things we were 30 years ago. Sitting in space stations and sending un-manned probes. When you think that the processor in your smartphone is thousands of times more powerful than the ones in Apollo 11......it kind of puts it into perespective that we haven't really moved forward much.
The last time we were on the moon was 1972. If you had told NASA that in the next 45 years that not only would we not have gone to Mars, but we wouldn't even land on the moon again......they would be aghast. The shuttle program was a disaster, not only in its monetary waste but in it's effectiveness.
The work that SpaceX are doing with cheap, re-usable rockets like the falcon 9 is finally moving us towards some progress. Once putting people and satelites into orbit becomes as cheap as buying a house.....and trust me its heading there....it will help fund the bigger goal of a manned colony on mars.
It was a general observation more than a comment on our space adventures. We've gone from having a chap with a red flag walk in front of automobiles to warn pedestrians, to having a continuously inhabited space station for the bones of two decades. We've landed probes on comets. I do agree with you about the relative stagnation of our advance into space and the key to the future is in the likes of SpaceX and the BFR.
On a related note, one of the things I liked most in the KSC was a Lego model of the Mars rover, easy to miss on display outside an attraction. It combines a few of my favourite things, a symbol of human ingenuity and endeavor and exploration, and best of all - it was made of Lego.
I have a photo somewhere.
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You've probably heard of Poison Glen in Co. Donegal. You may even have assumed that it was so named because of some feud or other involving the poisoning of the land. Like most placenames in Ireland it comes from Irish, only in this instance from a mistranslation rather than a phonetic approximation.
Nimh is the word for poison. So Gleann Nimhe would be Poison Glen. However, its name in Irish is not Gleann Nimhe, but Gleann Neimhe. The word neimhe comes from neamh, meaning heaven. So its name in English should be what the locals thought the beauty of the place brought to mind - Heavenly Glen.
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You've probably heard of Poison Glen in Co. Donegal. You may even have assumed that it was so named because of some feud or other involving the poisoning of the land. Like most placenames in Ireland it comes from Irish, only in this instance from a mistranslation rather than a phonetic approximation.
Nimh is the word for poison. So Gleann Nimhe would be Poison Glen. However, its name in Irish is not Gleann Nimhe, but Gleann Neimhe. The word neimhe comes from neamh, meaning heaven. So its name in English should be what the locals thought the beauty of the place brought to mind - Heavenly Glen.
It is very beautiful.0 -
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Keeping with the map theme
Between 1829 and 1842 the first ever large-scale survey of Ireland was done and these historical maps can be seen on the OSI website.
All over the country, surveyors marks from this survey can be found. Near us there is one of these surveyors marks carved into the bottom part of a hand hewn limestone gate post, on the road side.
This is an example of that mark.
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In South Dakota, 27 km away from Mount Rushmore, a colossal statue of the Lakota warrior Crazy Horse is currently under construction.Gutzon Borglum is credited for the creation of Mount Rushmore. He was also a member of the Ku Klux Klan.
If completed it will be 195m wide and 172m high. The head alone, which is half completed, is 27m high. In comparison, the heads at Mount Rushmore are about 18m high.
The sculpture was the idea of Henry Standing Bear, a Lakota elder, after he and his brother were both rebuffed by Gutzon Borglum after suggesting that Native American hero Crazy Horse belonged on Mount Rushmore with Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt.
He swapped 3 million square meters of his own fertile farmland for a mountain and hired sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski to design the monument. After Ziolkowski's death his wife took over, followed by his daughter. Many of his children and grandchildren are still active in the project.
Ziolkowski's design shows Crazy Horse pointing into the distance, indicating that all that land, despite broken treaties, still belonged to Native Americans as that is where their ancestors are buried. Problem is that for many Native Americans he may as well have had Crazy Horse high-fiving Sitting Bull. Plains Indians did not point with their index finger, instead they used their thumb.
This is what the monument will look like if its ever completed.
Here it is in its current state, after almost 70 years of work.
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Duckworth_Luas wrote: »
Ziolkowski's design shows Crazy Horse pointing into the distance, indicating that all that land, despite broken treaties, still belonged to Native Americans as that is where their ancestors are buried. Problem is that for many Native Americans he may as well have had Crazy Horse high-fiving Sitting Bull. Plains Indians did not point with their index finger, instead they used their thumb.
This is what the monument will look like if its ever completed.
Looks like there is still plenty of time to change that
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Duckworth_Luas wrote: »In South Dakota, 27 km away from Mount Rushmore, a colossal statue of the Lakota warrior Crazy Horse is currently under construction.
If completed it will be 195m wide and 172m high. The head alone, which is half completed, is 27m high. In comparison, the heads at Mount Rushmore are about 18m high.
The sculpture was the idea of Henry Standing Bear, a Lakota elder, after he and his brother were both rebuffed by Gutzon Borglum after suggesting that Native American hero Crazy Horse belonged on Mount Rushmore with Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt.
He swapped 3 million square meters of his own fertile farmland for a mountain and hired sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski to design the monument. After Ziolkowski's death his wife took over, followed by his daughter. Many of his children and grandchildren are still active in the project.
Ziolkowski's design shows Crazy Horse pointing into the distance, indicating that all that land, despite broken treaties, still belonged to Native Americans as that is where their ancestors are buried. Problem is that for many Native Americans he may as well have had Crazy Horse high-fiving Sitting Bull. Plains Indians did not point with their index finger, instead they used their thumb.
This is what the monument will look like if its ever completed.
Here it is in its current state, after almost 70 years of work.
Such a cool place! The museum is worth a visit if ever in South Dakota.0 -
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Keeping with the map theme
Between 1829 and 1842 the first ever large-scale survey of Ireland was done and these historical maps can be seen on the OSI website.
All over the country, surveyors marks from this survey can be found. Near us there is one of these surveyors marks carved into the bottom part of a hand hewn limestone gate post, on the road side.
This is an example of that mark.
These are called bench marks I think. There are a few dotted around my home town....
Doing a quick search :
The term bench mark, or benchmark, originates from the chiseled horizontal marks that surveyors made in stone structures, into which an angle-iron could be placed to form a "bench" for a leveling rod, thus ensuring that a leveling rod could be accurately re-positioned in the same place in the future.0
![[Deleted User]](/applications/dashboard/design/images/defaulticon.png)
True that! Nothing is set in stone. 
This discussion has been closed.
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