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24 October 2003

E-Bulletin Backscatter

LABRats in the News

From the Editor:

The LABRats program passed a milestone of sorts this past week when an article about the program appeard in the science and technology web site www.slashdot.com ("News for Nerds. Stuff That Matters"). The article can be found here. If this link doesn't work, go to slashdot.com and do a search for LABRats.

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time the LABRats program has been mentioned in the mass media. It certainly won't be the last.

Sheldon Greaves

Oops!

Hey Sheldon,

Please let everyone know that there is a mistake in last week's puzzle. It turns out that it is impossible to make 1 full revolution about the point O. The pin connection on the other end (5 units away) should be the point to fully rotate the linkage about.

Thanks,

Brian Mansfield

Video in a Rocket as an Altimeter

Sheldon,

Thinking about that video-camera-in-a-rocket article, it occurred to me that the camera could be used to determine altitude. If the camera viewed a known distance on the ground with say 200 pixels, with a 2 pixel error, that would be a 1 percent error. This produces a proportional error in the height calculation. At 1 Km that would be 10 meters. (Here I assume the earth is flat and that there is no error measuring the distance on the ground.) Not too bad. The error could be decreased by increasing the number of pixels.

Peter Baum