The Black Hole......

Surprised about the object oriented stuff. Even though it's not trendy right now it still seems like a staple in most CS programs.

I’m sure it is, unfortunately there seem to be a big disconnect between learning and understanding. Undergraduate students quickly understand there’s no real value in getting too deep into this stuff and as a result caring about as much as I cared about classic Latin in high school.
 
I can't imagine any major scientific software not using floating point math anymore
Yesterday I was checking some numbers from the Juno’s links and the scientific calculator of my Win10 responded to the 880/749 entry with a 31 decimal places (full display) result: 1.1748998664886515353805073431242
Out of curiosity I turned to MS Excel. Not much luck, it allows max 30 decimal places.
The surprise was that the result of the division in Excel was a mere 14 significant decimal places
1.174899866488650000000000000000

Wikipedia has an article over this Numeric precision in Microsoft Excel - Wikipedia

George
 
George,

I take it you don't get lost going out and about!

While on navigation, we could discuss "Wrong way Douglas Corrigan." He was quite famous for missing Long Beach California by quite a bit! 😉

His issue wasn't pi but rather phase.
 
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While on navigation, we could discuss "Wrong way Douglas Corrigan." He was quite famous for missing Long Beach California by quite a bit! 😉
His nickname was a tongue in cheek. The error was deliberate. There is no way that an almost 180 degrees compass deviation would have been left unnoticed by him even within the first hour of flight, let alone the rest of his flight.
Even without compass guidance at all, he knew his orientation (he took off at 05:15 so he could clearly see where east is). He was determined to do the flight he was been repeatedly denied by the authorities.

His issue wasn't pi but rather phase.
Right. He was not in phase with the authorities guide lines. 🙂

George
 
Thanks for clarifying.


Edit: Reading that back, it looks sarcastic, which wasn't my intent. It's just that I realized I don't have a useful response to your question. And by that I don't mean to infer that this mission is useless, as I feel quite the opposite. I think that discovering signs of life for the first time on a world other than our own would be rather interesting to say the very least.
 
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They're searching for evidence of life because they figured out a good place to look.

One of the missions primary goal is to explore the geology of Jezero Crater in order to assess past habitability. Jezero Crater is a geologically rich terrain, with many features and minerals formed by water that may date back as far as 3.6 billion years ago. Studying the geology and mineralogy of this site will provide a window into the planet’s climate history, and allows astrobiologists to determine if sites like these were persistent habitable environments that could have supported life in the past.

Perseverance will not be looking for organisms living on Mars today. However, the rover will collect data that could be used to identify biosignatures of ancient microbial life. Previous missions, from Pathfinder to Curiosity, have helped astrobiologists determine that habitable environments were present on Mars in the planet’s ancient past. However, while these environments may have been habitable, we do not know if they were inhabited (i.e. if life was ever present).

Mars 2020 | Missions | Astrobiology