Wednesday, February 25, 2004
There's Lotsa Space in Space
The current President Bush announced a renewed push to visit Mars awhile back. Some forget his father called for something similar but it fell off due to the shear expense of such a trip. So will we ever visit the planets in our solar system ala Star Trek? Well, Mars maybe and on any map of the solar system you've seen Jupiter is next on the way out, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. It might suprise you to find out that for most of the 80's and 90's Neptune was actually the outer most planet. Pluto's orbit took it inside of Neptune but it returned to the outside lane in 1999. But how far away is that anyway? Once we're at Mars, how much farther to Jupiter?
My daughter got a solar system mobile for Christmas I've still to put together. The question is can I put up the planets relatively to scale. Should be easy, on any solar system map it's just another few inches away. Ahhhhh, yes ... but what if we were indeed to put it scale? If I were to put this up to scale ... it wouldn't fit in her room ... it wouldn't fit in our city and yet the earth is the size of a ping pong ball in this mobile. How can that be given the solar systems we've seen in school? Well, that's so it'll fit in a book eh. If earth were the size of a pea, Jupiter would be placed over a thousand feet away to scale. So how far would Pluto be then from an earth-sized pea? A mile and half. OUr own solar system is that vast. And Pluto by no means marks the edge of what's considered our solar system, it's not even close to the edge. And that's just a very very very very very tiny part of our local area of space. Space is well, big!
( with apologies to Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything)
The current President Bush announced a renewed push to visit Mars awhile back. Some forget his father called for something similar but it fell off due to the shear expense of such a trip. So will we ever visit the planets in our solar system ala Star Trek? Well, Mars maybe and on any map of the solar system you've seen Jupiter is next on the way out, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. It might suprise you to find out that for most of the 80's and 90's Neptune was actually the outer most planet. Pluto's orbit took it inside of Neptune but it returned to the outside lane in 1999. But how far away is that anyway? Once we're at Mars, how much farther to Jupiter?
My daughter got a solar system mobile for Christmas I've still to put together. The question is can I put up the planets relatively to scale. Should be easy, on any solar system map it's just another few inches away. Ahhhhh, yes ... but what if we were indeed to put it scale? If I were to put this up to scale ... it wouldn't fit in her room ... it wouldn't fit in our city and yet the earth is the size of a ping pong ball in this mobile. How can that be given the solar systems we've seen in school? Well, that's so it'll fit in a book eh. If earth were the size of a pea, Jupiter would be placed over a thousand feet away to scale. So how far would Pluto be then from an earth-sized pea? A mile and half. OUr own solar system is that vast. And Pluto by no means marks the edge of what's considered our solar system, it's not even close to the edge. And that's just a very very very very very tiny part of our local area of space. Space is well, big!
( with apologies to Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything)
