ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 15 ต.ค. 2024
- In 1965, MIT's Lincoln Laboratory saw their Lincoln Calibration Sphere 1 (LCS-1) launched into Earth orbit. It was an empty aluminum sphere and couldn't do any science of its own. But the world's most boring disco ball has played a huge support role in astronomy, earth science, and engineering for over half a century!
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Sources:
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![[UNCUT]"ทนายตั้ม" แฉยับ! ความลับสวรรค์ ใครคือ "บิ๊กเทวดา" ของบอสพอล l คนดังนั่งเคลียร์ l 15 ต.ค. 67](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/ru9fpSaUwdA/mqdefault.jpg)
Somehow, even thought they are different elements, I chuckled when Hank at 0:43 said the aluminum ball was exactly what it said on the tin.
I giggled lol. Tin foil aluminum foil. Wonder if sleuth Hank joke
Huh, now that you mention it none of our tins are tin anymore. Our sewing tins, our tin cans, our tins of soup or cookies, our tin foil etc. All aluminium but we call it tin
Sometimes you get answers to questions you never knew you had asked...
When I worked in television, we always had to move our dish to a different satellite for the overnight feed when we went off the air.
We always had to sync with LCS-1 before switching to the new satellite feed.
I was 0 days old today when I learned what in the hell LCS-1 really was.
Thanks for the lesson! :)
Aint that the truth, I didn't even see this in mu notifications, just seen it while browsing, and yep, sure enough, had I thought to ask, or knew of its existance, I def would have looked into this!
You were just born today?
It's one of those things that makes a lot of sense when you learn about it, and understand it is a most critical thing necessary for other things; but usually don't bother to do so because it's overshadowed by those other things it supports and enables.
Well all you had to do was ask 🤷🏻♂️
At one job they kept saying this acronym and anytime I asked what it meant no one seemed to know, I'm like how are you training me if you don't even know what those letters stand for? I looked it up on Google and found out what it was and everything made more sense.
You have a remarkable lexicon and work experience for being mere hours old
Sometimes your spherical chicken in a vacuum just needs to actually be a spherical object in a near vacuum
Or spherical cow
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_cow
Consider a spherical cow of uniform density.
@@Torby4096is it frictionless?
@@backwashjoe7864 Did I forget that important attri🤔
Sometimes, the minutiae are more fascinating than a lot of the big stories. This, for me, is such a case.
Yes this was a great video
Hank is the most entertaining of the SciShow presenters, hands-down. 😂
You'd think he'd just be mailing it in by now, but no, he still got it!
I only watch them if they're hosted by Hank.
@@joshsnyder4868 I've heard "phoning it in," but never "mailing it in" before. I'm guessing from the context that it has a similar/same meaning. Kinda cool, I think I'll use that one sometime. Thanks! 😊
@@JJ-rm7jw fair use. Also go ahead and borrow this one tomorrow, "FedEx Friday".
Yes, & very endearing!
Fascinating. I was familiar with the two Echo satellites launched in 1960, but not with LCS-1. The Echo satellites were 30m inflated spheres made of aluminized mylar, and were designed to test radio communication by reflection, and not for calibration. Both satellites re-entered in the late 1960s.
You go little old Aluminum Ball.
Hank makes something common and mundane into something exciting. Great job.
I've always wondered how they know if the instruments are reading information correctly. Cool to know we have something that they can test instruments on.
ESA have an Earth observation satellite called Aeolus that measures wind speeds in our atmosphere.
They have some ground based equipment too to make sure that what the satellite is measuring from space is actually the same as the conditions measured from the surface.
@@massimookissed1023 ah! I thought weather stations just observed their areas with ground based equipment. Though I do know that they have a super computer in wyoming. That the information from weather collected by satellites goes to! I think it's to observe weather patterns and calculate weather into the future.
@@pyrogotz5076 commercial aircraft also gather weather data for places that model the atmosphere and try to predict weather.
They can collect temperature and pressure readings, maybe humidity too, and possibly windspeed (measured at the plane vs plane's speed from GPS).
All those flights can gather data from locations that ground-based monitoring stations can't access.
@@pyrogotz5076 the vast majority of global climate data is from satellites. The earth is huge and there's still tons of remote areas that don't have good, reliable weather stations.
@@ax14pz107 ah that makes sense!
Here at Space Fence, we use both LCS spheres and a couple other objects for radar calibration. We track from LEO all the way to GEO. At low orbit we can track extremely small objects! All thanks to MIT-Lincoln Labs
I had Zero idea this existed! 🤔 Very cool!! 😀
Thank you, Hank, you guys keep covering really important science topics that do not get the coverage they should. At the same time you cover the flash stuff too as well as anybody (and better than all but specialists). I guess you guys are high-quality entertainment for the thinkers.
Hank, we all know that you are the best that humanity has to offer.
That’s so cool. Not boring or mundane at all! I love simple elegant solutions 👏🏻
Wow... this seems super important and I have never heard of it till now!
Many important things are like that.
Thank you LCS-1! We love and appreciate you!
The real Space Balls
Oh. This makes so much sense but I never would have thought of it. How interesting!
An aluminum pole can add a nice touch to the room during the holiday season.
Especially during the airing of grievances
I didn't know this ball, thanks for the news.
what a lovely video! ty for the research on such a useful little hollow aluminum ball :D
This whole video read so much like a Pin-of-the-Month announce ment to me lol. I was waiting the whole time to see what the pin design was, I was really expecting to buy it
You just don't get to hear about things like this and you'd never know they exist unless someone just tells you 🤷♀️
Thank you so very much!!! I love this!!!
Such an awesomely simple solution. Genius.
Thank you shinning space ball, thank you sciShow
Wish you discussed how they got it into orbit and why the orbit has remained relatively stable for decades
titan rocket, geocentric orbit...... you're welcome
Too far out to have any drag from the atmosphere.
@@greensteve9307 As Hank said in the video, it *does* get some drag. It's just little enough that it's expected to stay up for about 1000 years.
Tysm for this I was looking everywhere for a good description of this thing and you nailed it!
now imagine you are another civilization finding this sphere floating in space and trying to understand its function, meaning, and purpose.
I’ve tracked LCS-1 (1361) and LCS-4 (5398) numerous times in my radar career.
There are several different calibration satellites available. AJISAI (16908) is a mirror ball with laser reflectors.
Love simple and successful! Thank You.
Space disco ball sounds insanely cool though. The earth and moon are always having a party!
Best comment lol.
Hecking knew it was Hank with a title like that!
"It's own kind of party"
It's kinda like the audio tech's party. Everyone's up and in front cheers for the heroes on the stage. Backstage have their own party.
It might be worth noting that later, Lincoln Laboratory built and launched a series of active communications satellites into orbit. The LES (Lincoln Experimental Satellite) series were far more reliable than almost any others built by for-profit defense contractors. The last in the series, LES 8 and LES-9 were launched into synchronous altitude* in 1976 and in the almost sixty years since then, they never failed.
*Synchronous altitude but not geosynchronous. An observer on earth sees each of these satellites moving in a figure eight pattern repeating daily.
"They're only flashy in the literal sense"
😂 🤣 so true
Why am I only hearing about this legendary ex beercans now?
So many tiny little barely formed questions floating around the skull just got lightbulbed!
Thanks Hank😎
Almost as impressive as the inanimate carbon rod that saved the very lives of the Spcae Shuttle mission crewed by Race Banyon, Buzz Aldrin and Homer Simpson!
I love details like this.
This was a good one!
Imagine if a nearly perfectly round hollow metal sphere, perhaps mildly damaged by collisions, fell into our solar system. The paranoia that it would create would be extreme even if it essentially was merely a calibration sphere that got lost to its original purpose.
I have had a similar thought myself as an idea for a science fiction book or movie. What if something entered our solar system from outer space but it was totally mundane, i.e. a spanner or a sheet of metal.
That’s no moon… it’s a calibration sphere!
It wouldn't be a case of what it is, but what it means.
Considering the time it would take it to get here.
It would mean they were probably at roughly a comparable level to us, when we launched ours, tens of thousands of years ago.
What their technology could be today, could be godlike to us.
@@lordgarion514 careful: there is no guarantee that technology and economies can grow forever. A civilization millions of years older than ours may be perfectly conceivable in its technological superiority over us.
@@52flyingbicycles
Which is EXACTLY why I said *could be* and not *would be*. 👍
LCS = Little Cute Sphere?
Large cute sphere?
I am curious to see how it's surface held up to all those years of micro meteorites
There is an ongoing experiment that is dozens of square panels, made of different materials and exposed to leo. I wonder how it's getting on?
A no-go gauge 60 years old and still going. Manufacturing managers are salivating watching this video
Imagine getting hit by a wrench moving 7 km/s. The words 'red mist' comes to mind.
Why is this not the pin of the month?
The Aluminum Sphere is a hero among the ranks of Inanimate Carbon Rod.
for a minute I thought that was the Sputnik - first spacecraft in history and it also looks like a ball
I have a _bone_ to pick with you, Hank. Five years ago, you and John guest hosted Good Mythical Morning, and it was fantastic. But _when_ are you going to get Rhett and Link to guest host an episode of SciShow!?
Now that I think about it, even if an asteroid or something passes by Earth and doesn't collide, it will probably bring down a lot of the space debris.
That disco ball was here to always reminder us of the 70's
This episode has excellent writing
Just have to be shiny and round to be important enough to go into space? Where do I apply?
You might not have heard the 'aluminum' part. But I fulfill 2/3 requirements, too!
I was wondering if it's still perfectly round, given all the stuff out there in space.
Calibration sphere, eh? Garrus Vakarian approves.
When I was at JPL,we needed to precisely calibrate a radar we’d built. We had a local firm make a 12” aluminum sphere and took the whole kit and caboodle out to Goldstone in the Mojave desert, hoisted it with a tethered balloon, and proceeded to do exactly that. Fun!
Who knew foil had so many uses! So if we tossed a Turkey up there to be cooked by the sun could we do a ‘test the turkey" exam to see if it’s done? Although re-entry may be a bit better at cooking it (Scott Manly actually did an entire video on this, sorry to Scott if I spelled his name wrong).
I give LCS-1 5 stars!
It's so poetic to me that what is arguably the least interesting of humankinds space tech is one of the most important. Whenever you are feeling small or unappreciated remember that an unimpressive space marble has been and continues to be one of the most important tools for space exploration since it first began 💕💕.
I for one would like to thank our lofty shiny ball
How did they build a perfect metallic sphere?
Honestly really cool :D
lol this showed up in my feed just as i put down one of them foil balls i spend like 2 days tinkering on
Measurements are integral to science, and calibration of measurement devices is integral to their efficacy. This gave me the same jolt as the Veritasium video about measuring very small things.
2:40 It looks like the guy in the photo is having a meeting with the spheres, explaining to them why they don’t get to go to space.
What a great science factoid. I had not heard of LCS before.
Thats what that thing is I swore I saw a ball way out there with a telescope once but none of my peers knew what it was so thats cool thanks Hank :)
You should have mentioned that the LCS-2 and LCS-3 were not successfully deployed and that is why there are two balls numbered one and four.
Better in space than flying around on it's own in some small city morgue
Finally! We have made Space Balls a reality!
This is so cool!!
I love plain aluminium ball.
I am unreasonably happy to know that the aluminium ball is still in orbit.
@1:59 - Wouldn't an aluminium cube with comparably smooth surfaces actually have a larger radar cross-section and "look bigger" when seen face-on rather than from a corner what with deflecting the radar rather than reflecting it back to the source?
Probably.
Kind of like if the moon was covered in mirrors to make a giant disco ball, we'd barely see it. Just an occasional beam passing over us.
Who would win?
- Plain ol' aluminum ball
- Inanimate carbon rod
The first (and only) British-built and launched satellite, Prospero, also known as the X-3, was launched in 1971. It is still up there. If only we had made it spherical...
My question after seeing pictures of the NACA sphere and the pseudo sphere is, is it really a Mylar fabric with aluminum skin, as a balloon? And if so, was it inflated once in orbit by a gas, or was it a foam? It could explain why there is a difference in reflectivity.
More space videos let's go.
Imagine a civilization's first visit to their moon where they find a large perfectly round ball of aluminum that has no message or function.
Finally, Spaceballs
So it is the control for every telecsopr.
I wonder how many people saw one of those in a telescope and thought it was a ufo
Zero. Way to small at that size and distance.
Probably nobody. For reference, it appears about the same size as Pluto from Earth, which is quite difficult to spot. It would be nearly impossible to spot unless you knew where to look, or had an extremely powerful telescope.
To be fair, if they couldn't identify it, it was
@@iamdigory Is something in orbit flying?
@@MaxElkin No, it's falling with style.
Oooh, shiny✨
So this thought comes up. Does time dilation drastically change with the distance from the star with planets moving at different rates of speed and velocity and or oval orbits that slingshot around the sun.
Would orbital mechanics limit the rate of time dilation keeping uniform velocities of stars and distance ?
"It's only flashy in the most literal sense. The world's most boring disco balls." I can't stop laughing at that...
Welp, time for my new tattoo.
How about using that LASER-propulsion to keep (modern) satellites from falling out of orbit by outfitting them with a "light-sail" or two?
You should do an episode on metrology.
LCS deserved the pin treatment.
I am curious if we'll ever get a LCS 5 & 6..?
Just imagine two 10m³ spheres of extremely precisely polished Aluminium launched from a SpaceX Starship Super-Heavy Launch Vehicle & placed into Lagrange Points 4 & 5 - there calibrate our radar/lidar/etc. to help us navigate in local (Earth/Moon) space.
It’s ain’t much but it is honest work
Inanimate Carbon Rod!
Are you guys going to close SciShow Space?
No more new vids from SciShow Space, but the channel will still be there with all its old vids.
How can object without propulsion get into a steady orbit without fine adjustments?
so the scientists are pondering the orb, badum-tsh
Meanwhile, it’s a Microwave’s worst nightmare.
Really depends how it be made
Actually it would be fine as the surface is completely smooth…. To get sparks you need ridges for it to jump to….
@@gamingclipz7309 it won't be round after getting jammed into the microwave!
Radar uses microwaves so it's not bad for them.
Microwaves are made of aluminium mate.
The Bizarre Story of Human Progress sounds like the title of a book that you would write
I Love this so much
This video causes SciShow Space withdrawal symptoms.
You can't fool me SciShow, I know that's actually the Traveler
truly an unsung hero