A pair of smallsats built by Rocket Lab for a NASA mission to Mars have arrived in Florida for a launch this fall on the inaugural flight of New Glenn.
This is going to sound weird given my surprise, but JWST seems smaller than I expected! I definitely expected the mirror array to be like 10 or 20 people tall or more, not 3.
To be fair, I also didn’t expect Hubble’s mirror to be not much bigger than a person.
All the ground based telescopes throw off my expectations.
Edit: Actually, I think it’s the radio telescopes throwing off my expectations
Yeah, humans for scale definitely help:
Here’s ViaSat-3 Americas:
And here’s a 1:1 scale model of the unfolded JWST:
Spacecraft can be surprisingly large.
This is going to sound weird given my surprise, but JWST seems smaller than I expected! I definitely expected the mirror array to be like 10 or 20 people tall or more, not 3.
To be fair, I also didn’t expect Hubble’s mirror to be not much bigger than a person.
All the ground based telescopes throw off my expectations.
Edit: Actually, I think it’s the radio telescopes throwing off my expectations