John Smith wrote:
Cecil Moore wrote:

AI4QJ wrote:

That is his "obvious" explanation. He should remove that from his
webpage as it is rather embarassing.


W8JI made a gross error in his measurement and
then tried to rationalize the impossible result.


Cecil:

How would you have like to be working at NASA, with this group; And, you
were the one responsible for not coverting kilometers to miles and
SMACKING that spacecraft we lost into Mars? ;-)


It wasn't km and miles, it was pounds and newtons AND
the error was that Lockheed Martin supplied the thrust data in pounds,
unlike the contractual requirement to supply it in Newtons (which is
what we at JPL have used for decades). The error wasn't caught because
the absolute magnitude of the force is very small, so the differences
from predict to observation were on the order of the measurement
uncertainty. (We're talking measuring the velocity to mm/sec and range
to mm, when its at Mars.)
I'd venture that anyone would find measuring distances to 1 part in 1E12
challenging...





Crud, I've volunteered on serving on those soup-lines, would hate to
have seen ya' there. chuckle

Regards,
JS