Yea, somebody had to calculate that shit

[MJ DeMarco]

This is the flight path to the comet landing that just happened.

I'm amazed that someone actually calculated all of this stuff, trajectories, gravity, whatever... the thought on how to calculate such a thing is mindboggling.

 

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[DeletedUser394]

Didn't expect a thread title like this to come from MJ haha.

Yeah, that shit, is awesome.

 

[G_Alexander]

Truly unbelievable and grandiose in scale and execution. I have literally been talking / thinking about this all day. Fascinating.

Stars, Galaxies & the Universe was my favorite class in c.o.l.l.e.g.e (as well as physics). The truth can be more fascinating than the imagination sometimes.

This last week has been good to us. INTERSTELLAR gets released (really loved it), then this 10-year mission completes successfully. To further satiate your space needs, watch "COSMOS" on Netflix! Very good program.

 

[mt_myke]

Yay, something I know a bit about. The math isn't all that hard because there's not much volatility in the motion of planets...they pretty much move in well defined cycloids (think Spirograph). In fact the basics were figured out back in the 1600s already (Kepler's laws of planetary motion). The more general name of this kind of thing is the n-body problem:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-body_simulation

Gruesome to calculate by hand, it still gives me pause to think of the engineers that did all this with just slide rules during the Space Race era. With modern computers a simple gravity assist flight path is probably a suitable physics undergrad project.

That's the theory part anyway. Actually executing and getting a real probe to land on a comet years after launch is a phenomenal achievement.

 

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[Yeezy]

The comet mining industry will be here soon.

 

[Andrew Heron]

Interesting to think of everything that has happened back here on earth while that probe has been quietly hurtling through space.

 

[RHL]

Your brain is not really equipped to understand the distances that thing is flying either. My mind was blown the first time I saw this picture:

That's a scale picture of how far the earth is from the moon relative to the size of each. To put that in perspective, every planet in the solar system can fit in the gap between the earth and the moon at the greatest extent of its orbit.

Now, look at MJ's post again. The probe traveled many, many times farther than that when it made its first intercept.

This stuff is awesome.

 

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[MJ DeMarco]

Talk about event/process... this project started in the 80's. And now, after all these years, we get to the event!

Jean de Lafontaine, an aerospace engineer who said he was the only member of the Rosetta mission’s embryonic “lander team” in 1987, traveled at his own expense from his home near Montreal, Canada. “I worked on this project 25 years ago and didn’t think it would be realized,” he said

 

[ZCP]

Take a moment and show this to the kids around you and in your life. We are hurting for engineers right now. The old guard is retiring and dying, the ones that were to replace them (my generation) was one of the smallest ever, new kids had no co-op jobs (due to the economy) and thus no experience. Pretty much everything in this country needs to be replaced in the next 30 years. We need technical people. Any chance to excite a young mind about doing something like this, please take a minute to really get them into the WOW factor and hook them by letting them see that THEY could be the ones doing it in the years to come.....engineers, electronics technicians, welders, machinists. We NEED you!

 

[MJ DeMarco]

engineers

I loved astronomy, chemistry, and science... until I learned it required all forms of advanced mathematics. After one calculus class I was like "screw this".

The real challenge is making mathematics fun, IMO.

 

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[biggeemac]

I was thinking the same thing....I can't even hit the toilet with the level of accuracy that they managed to do in outer space.....10+ years in advance.

ok, bad joke......but an awesome feat of engineering !

 

[townhaus]

I loved astronomy, chemistry, and science... until I learned it required all forms of advanced mathematics. After one calculus class I was like "screw this".

The real challenge is making mathematics fun, IMO.

MJ, did you ever explore systematic trading, my favourite subjects at school were maths / physics also. Testing most trading systems involves high school maths and basic coding, simple methods tend to work best & creativity, knowing what works for your risk/goals is the biggest factor IMO.

 

[ZCP]

I loved astronomy, chemistry, and science... until I learned it required all forms of advanced mathematics. After one calculus class I was like "screw this".

The real challenge is making mathematics fun, IMO.

Those are called weed out classes. Part of being an engineer is getting through something that you have no idea how to do.
I haven't done calculus problems in a LONG time.....

 

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[biophase]

Those are called weed out classes. Part of being an engineer is getting through something that you have no idea how to do.
I haven't done calculus problems in a LONG time.....

I was decent at math in college until I took differential equations and matrix theory. Never had a D in my life until then.

 

[RHL]

I got my first D in medical physics, which was mostly a DiffEQ-based class. I was in the professor's office like 3-4 hours a week. Man, what an a$$ beating.

 

[ZCP]

You get through it. Then you get into a system dynamics class and they show you 'why' you are learning DIFEQ and it all begins to make sense.

Got to learn the syntax before you can code!

 

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[mt_myke]

I was decent at math in college until I took differential equations and matrix theory. Never had a D in my life until then.

Trying to figure out analytical (closed-form) solutions for differential equations is pretty bogus anyway, and all but a useless anachronism in the modern world. Calculus is fine enough, you build on first principles and are able to solve most problems reasonably. Differential equation classes, on the other hand, basically teach you a "grab bag" of tricks that work for a very few hand-picked examples and nothing you'd ever encounter in practice - it's BS. Any real work with differentials is done numerically on computers, they should skip the old school differential equation classes entirely and replace them with more time spent discussing the problems encountered when using numerical methods. Solving differential equations analytically is no more relevant to the modern world than doing numerical work with slide rules.

Matrix math is another thing entirely. It's hugely important and used everywhere...every time you watch a video or listen to music or make a phone call there's a ton of matrix math going on in your computer or phone. The technology behind things like rendering 3D videogames is basically just a ton of matrix transformations, and graphics cards are just specialized add-on computers designed to add and multiply matrices together, very many of them at once and very quickly. They even sell specialized versions without any video output at all, if you stick a half dozen of them into a regular PC you've basically got a low-end supercomputer.

I took exactly one graduate level college class, which was Digital Signal Processing, which also made it clear to me I'd hit my intellectual limit for math. It involved a ton of matrix calculus...I just couldn't keep up any more. The good thing about all this is that you really don't need to know the math inside and out, that's the difference between a mathematician and an engineer. An engineer just needs to know enough to apply the knowledge. I used to hang out on game developer chats and many of those people didn't even know simple high school physics, yet were able to create full 3D games by using (leveraging) software components that abstracted away all the math.

 

[mt_myke]

You get through it. Then you get into a system dynamics class and they show you 'why' you are learning DIFEQ and it all begins to make sense.

The problem is traditional diffy-q classes teach the wrong thing. Differential equations allow you to express system dynamics with simple and elegant relationships between rates of change (usually) when there's no simple closed form solution ("give an equation that shows the output of this machine for any time input"). The diffy-q classes I took all focused on trying to derive these solutions, which is pointless in the modern world, when you need the actual numbers you let the computer grind it out. It's been a long time since I was in college so maybe they don't do it that way anymore, but I suspect they do...

 

[ZCP]

My point to @MJ DeMarco was that the early math is similar to the weedout of the early 'wantprenuers'. Get through the first part and get on the path and you can create great things.

 

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[theag]

Nearly failed high school because of an F in physics. Sweet talked the professor up to a F+ and got my degree, hehe. Was always good in maths though. Just pretty lazy and hated the physics teacher :>.

On topic: pretty amazing stuff.

 

[mt_myke]

I loved astronomy, chemistry, and science... until I learned it required all forms of advanced mathematics. After one calculus class I was like "screw this".

I've been laughing about this all day. I read (more like consumed) the fastlane book over a few days last Christmas. Until that point I had been working on a do-it-yourself financial engineering education, using all the free and cheap resources I could get my hands on. I'd done the math for calculating options, business valuations, yield curves...I was so deep in that I'd totally missed what the most basic math was telling me. The fastlane book laid out, with simple but irrefutable math, that trying to become wealthy thru regular income was never going to work. I could become one of the best analysts out there but all it would get me was a fixed amount of money per unit of my time...just moving sideways between slowlanes. It was like a sledgehammer to the forehead, and I abandoned my original plan within the week.

What I've learned since then is that for the most part, business doesn't require much past high school math. I've been watching Shark Tank and on one Kevin O'Leary asked the guy "What was your free cash flow last year?". He responded $750k, and a second later Kevin said, "Your business is worth $2.5M" (the guy had valued it at $6M). No stochastic calculus, no monte carlo methods, just free cash flow times five and take off a third for taxes - there's your valuation.

 

[MJ DeMarco]

I could become one of the best analysts out there but all it would get me was a fixed amount of money per unit of my time

Not unless you start your own hedge fund. If you want to get on the cover of Forbes, don't invest in the markets, serve them.

 

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[CommonCents]

The question I have for them going to all that effort/$$ for 10 yrs is......why? Is it to target asteroids that are on a collision path w/ earth? and change their orbit slightly? I see nobody in the media asking why. I don't believe the answer is, just because, to see if we can do it...to enrich our lives. haha

 

[mt_myke]

I don't believe the answer is, just because, to see if we can do it...to enrich our lives. haha

That is exactly the answer. We've done "hard landing" comet probes before (a spear-like probe shot into a comet) but this is the first time we've had an orbiter module with a lander. It's a HUGE technical achievement. We will learn a lot about the comet, and we will learn a lot that will let us design and successfully execute the next, more ambitious space probe.

 

[Milkanic]

I wish I appreciated this stuff earlier in life. I've been going back and learning math on wikipedia/khan academy and it's amazing how triangles relate to radians and pi and onto calculus and rates of change.

Either I was asleep or my math teachers in high school did a terrible job showing the beauty in all of it.

 

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[G_Alexander]

I loved astronomy, chemistry, and science... until I learned it required all forms of advanced mathematics. After one calculus class I was like "screw this".

Totally agree with you here @MJ DeMarco, I was the same way and I think it has to do with being right brained. I have always been a dreamer, fascinated by science (chemistry, physics), music (all types, including scores i.e. Hans Zimmer), history...but you throw high-level math in there and it was a BURDEN (and go figure, I went into i-banking for two years). My ACT score for Science was a 35 while math was a lowly 28. CALC II sucked (the only "C" I got in college).

Still a necessary evil for us entrepreneurs; luckily business math / low level finance is a piece of cake.

 

[townhaus]

 

[The-J]

Humans are awesome when they want to be. That shit is F*ckin cool, I don't care what anyone says.

 

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[geko_man]

https://www.facebook.com/NASA/photos/pcb.10152805001611772/10152805001146772/?type=1&theater

Images from the lander. Amazing stuff!

 

[Don Dano]

It was a fantastic and mindblowing operation. Respect for the minds who achieved this.