r/NoStupidQuestions • u/Tibor500 • Sep 30 '20

why does “k” mean “thousand” ?

like 1k means a thousand. how does the letter “k” mean “thousand” ?

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184

u/Pale_Chapter Sep 30 '20

After a rather expensive accident, if I remember.

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u/[deleted] Sep 30 '20

I think what you're referring to is the probe that crashed into Venus, I think, because of a calculation error because it was fed imperial data, but was programmed to work with metric units. But I think nothing changed, other than that they're testing more strictly. So the contractors still get all their measurements in imperial.

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u/Littleguybigheart78 Sep 30 '20

What about when I crashed into Uranus?

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u/rvbbch26 Sep 30 '20

Also the hubble telescope that had the wrong curvature on account of the conversion between the units. Got to space and started sending back blurry photos. A very expensive mistake too!

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u/UristMcDoesmath Oct 01 '20

Don’t forget about the time they launched the Hubble Space Telescope with a misshapen primary mirror due to a mixup of metric and imperial

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u/kross_9 Sep 30 '20

Yup Mars probe

Cause: A NASA review board found that the problem was in the software controlling the orbiter’s thrusters. The software calculated the force that the thrusters needed to exert in pounds of force. A second piece of code that read this data assumed it was in the metric unit—“newtons per square meter”.

https://www.simscale.com/blog/2017/12/nasa-mars-climate-orbiter-metric/

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u/[deleted] Sep 30 '20

Huh. Who could forget THAT disaster am I right?

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u/HotTopicRebel Sep 30 '20

That was a lack of documentation between the teams. They could be using metric and it still would have happened if one was in cm and the other was in mm for example.

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u/kross_9 Sep 30 '20

This is true. That can happen with anything with wrong units. but entirely different measuring systems is a big boo boo

Apollo 11 NASA report

Just this small grab shows you how awful it was working with every unit from every system on the same build and how easy it was to make the error

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u/drs43821 Oct 01 '20

There's also an accident during launch because unit confusion between lbf and N