James Webb telescope reaches its final destination in space, million miles away

Re:James Webb telescope reaches its final destination in spa... by Sharlin on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @09:38AM (#30072223)

It’s really easy to get a wrong intuitive sense of the size of these things! I don’t understand why space agencies don’t always have human figures for reference in their visualizations. Or even a simple scale bar! We just get these silly “the size of a tennis court” type textual comparisons. Few people realize how big the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers are, as another example.

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Re:James Webb telescope reaches its final destination in spa... by divbzero on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @03:16PM (#30077447)

> Few people realize how big the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers are

… and how much larger they are than Sojourner from the Pathfinder mission. Perseverance was sent with a metal plate depicting profiles of all five Mars rovers to date: Sojourner, Spirit, Opportunity, Curiosity, and Perseverance. [1].

[1]: https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/mars-rovers/en/mars-rovers_metal...

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Re:James Webb telescope reaches its final destination in spa... by egeozcan on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @10:59AM (#30073273)

> Few people realize how big the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers are

To be fair, Perseverance looks as big as I imagined it would be, about the size of an SUV but wider (because even in 2020s, they still don't have streets in mars, what a bummer): https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/05/science/mars-2020-rover-n...

Or did my googling fail me? :)

edit: direct image link around paywall: https://static01.nyt.com/images/2020/02/18/science/18mars202...

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Re:James Webb telescope reaches its final destination in spa... by ravi-delia on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @12:13PM (#30074511)

My mental image until I looked it up was around the size of a dog. No, I don't know why

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Re:James Webb telescope reaches its final destination in spa... by jpindar on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @12:31PM (#30074817)

The older ones were smaller.

https://earthlymission.com/size-comparison-generations-mars-...

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Re:James Webb telescope reaches its final destination in spa... by Sharlin on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @03:04PM (#30077267)

But even Spirit and Oppy were… well, I guess they're roughly the size of a very large dog. At 185 kg, much heavier than even the largest dogs though.

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Re:James Webb telescope reaches its final destination in spa... by Angostura on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @05:39PM (#30079124)

Because it's called rover? :)

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Re:James Webb telescope reaches its final destination in spa... by etskinner on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @01:39PM (#30075990)

https://archive.is/tpcRK for the article

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Re:James Webb telescope reaches its final destination in spa... by aitchnyu on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @12:35PM (#30074870)

Stupid me thought its go kart sized like the one Howard Wolowitz in The Big Bang Theory brought to a baseball stadium.

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Re:James Webb telescope reaches its final destination in spa... by aksss on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @01:55PM (#30076244)

I believe the banana is the Internet standard for visual scale.

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Re:James Webb telescope reaches its final destination in spa... by jl6 on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @02:21PM (#30076651)

Also radioactivity, which also suits a Mars rover comparison.

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