Sun-seeking NASA boffins steer FLEETS of satellites... BY HAND Looking for something to test your Star Wars video game skills? How about this: launch four satellites and fly them in eccentric orbits around the Earth. Each satellite is 1km apart from its neighbour, which sounds like a lot of space until you consider that they’re travelling at several kilometres per second during the …
"The same calculations that took two weeks on their traditional systems now take 20 minutes on dual NVIDIA K20s. That’s about a 1,000 per cent improvement by my calculations, which isn’t bad at all."
Ahem, 2 weeks = 20,160 min; this yields ~1,000 fold performance improvement or 100,000 per cent, not 1,000 per cent.
It's also how (relatively) minimal the hardware is to get it.
It's basically 2 slots in a PC.
BTW the "zero energy pathways" thing I think refers to passing between 2 orbits in this universe with zero energy expenditure. Roughly the vehicle "rolls downhill" from an orbit around one body to another orbit around another body whose energy level matches.
Upside is no thrust, downside is time is not a parameter so it may well be s-l-o-w.
BTW the "zero energy pathways" thing I think refers to passing between 2 orbits in this universe with zero energy expenditure
Yeah, that's what I thought. An example would be kicking a vehicle just hard enough to take it out of Earth orbit and into a solar orbit which intersects with, say, the future position of Mars. It effectively uses the Sun to fall from Earth to Mars, the trick being to arrive with just the right velocity to insert into Mars orbit.
"Yeah, that's what I thought. An example would be kicking a vehicle just hard enough to take it out of Earth orbit and into a solar orbit which intersects with, say, the future position of Mars. It effectively uses the Sun to fall from Earth to Mars, the trick being to arrive with just the right velocity to insert into Mars orbit."
That's my understanding. Finding those exact orbits (in time, altitude and point on orbit for the pulse), and when they recur is AFAIK where it all gets very tricky.
The other jokes as I said is time scale could be anything.
A zero energy orbit to Mars in 10 years? Not much of an achievement (at least not if you're a human).
... find “zero energy pathways”, which are points between universes that are frictionless and supposedly require no energy to transit. If true, these passages would give us the ability to live in a different universe and commute back to this one for work and shopping.
Reminds me of the 'Long Earth' books, eh?
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