Ye Olde Rocket Forum - View Single Post - Odd Concept Scale vehicles

Hey how have you been, Blackshire?? Doing well I hope.

That was an interesting video. Just goes to show just how much we've learned about the solar system and planets in the decades since that film was made! Still thought Mercury was tidally locked to the Sun (it's not, it rotates in a 3:2 resonance with it's orbital period, which makes for some interesting possibilities when it comes to exoplanets that we would normally consider "tidally locked" since such resonances would seem to allow for the planet to actually rotate and avoid becoming "eyeball planets" they would be if completely tidally locked, making them much more habitable). Not much known about Venus either but the clouds and thick atmosphere and the surface temperature. Mars "greening" was a bit on the fanciful side, but still couldn't actually be "disproven" until later on, though most scientists of the time were leaning more toward the "cold dry" Mars model because the atmospheric density and composition was known to be thin carbon dioxide, not particularly amenable to life. The assessment of Jupiter was also a bit fanciful, as the concept of the Great Red Spot being clouds around some unseen high terrain below was highly unlikely. Saturn was pretty accurate given what was known then, including Titan and its atmosphere, but of course it would be decades before we knew much about Titan, where water is frozen and weathered away into "sand" and the lakes are made of liquified natural gas... As for the outer planets, virtually NOTHING was known about them at the time other than they were gas giants, which could be calculated from their gravitational effects on other planets (mass), size (volume) and therefore calculate the density, which would have showed them to be too light to be anything but gas and liquid with maybe small rocky/metal cores. Likewise with Pluto. Hence no need to go there in the video and 'show our ignorance' about them...

Later! OL J R