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Measuring Space.(Brief Article)
When scientists study objects in space, they deal with distances so vast that they must compress their data into manageable terms. One way scientists compress data is to prepare scale models or scale drawings of objects. In doing that, each object is brought down to a reasonable size, while keeping the sizes of all of the objects relative to one another.
In the early months of 1974, space probe Mariner 10 neared the planet Venus. Television cameras were turned on when the probe was about 450,000 miles away from Venus. The picture you see is one of those sent back to Earth.
This photo of Venus shows that the planet has an active atmosphere. Notice the dramatic swirl of clouds near the south pole of Venus.
Scientists make scale models of very large objects.
A basketball and a softball are too large to draw on this page. But if you wanted to show the size of a basketball relative to a softball, you could draw the balls to scale. A basketball has a diameter of about 40 inches and a softball has a diameter of about 20 inches. You could represent the two spheres to scale by dividing both diameters by the same number--20.
Now you can represent the basketball with a picture of a sphere that has the diameter of 2 inches and the softball with a diameter of 1 inch. Your scale is 1 inch equals 20 inches. Now you can visualize the relative sizes of two large objects by seeing them in smaller sizes.
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