Talk:Helios probes
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- Gm being Gigameters?
- What happened with the space probes?
- --Abdull 19:09, 28 July 2005 (UTC)
Gigameters is a rather bizarre scale to use. Kilometers is the standard for measuring distances in the solar system. Meters is only used in astronomical conventions when it is in exponential format.
There is no "natural" scale for anything, much less the inner solar system. They are all artificial.
- I can't recall ever seeing the term in any scientific text. The only other place I've seen it is in lists of orders of magnitude relative to the meter. I Googled, and found about 946 total references to "gigameters/gigametres" and about 8,970,000 references to "million kilometers/million kilometres." There's apparently at least one user who's married to the idea of using gigameters in this article; I'd appreciate him/her giving us some links to some scientific texts that use the term. Otherwise I say we drop it from the article. Dyfsunctional 12:05, 11 January 2006 (UTC)
- This is the SI official unit (prefix+meter), even if not often used. Giving the equivalence in au would be more useful. --ArséniureDeGallium 17:18, 11 January 2006 (UTC)
- I would agree that the AU is probably the best unit for distances inside the solar system. However, a quick peek at some of the other articles about solar system objects shows that gigameters (and a few other unwieldy prefix+meter units) have been used quite liberally in the WP, so there may be some kind of consensus that I'm not aware of. Also, if you look closely, the phrases "one gigameter" and "one million kilometers" identically follow the SI number+prefix+base unit formula. Dyfsunctional 03:56, 13 January 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Fly a light year
How many years would it take for this craft to fly one light year? 4.240.42.88 23:57, 18 August 2006 (UTC)
