I'd really like to see a few more markers:<p>1) 3100 px: Farthest humans have been from Earth (Apollo 13, April '70: 400,171 km)<p>2) 10 px: Gemini 11, farthest from Earth on non-lunar mission (Sept '66: 1,374.1 km)<p>3) 3 px: Apogee of ISS (farthest a human has traveled for... a while: 424 km) (I'm probably forgetting something, can't find a good list of spaceflights by distance...)<p>Sources:
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight_records#Farthest_humans_from_Earth" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight_records#Far...</a><p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station</a><p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth</a><p>Taking Earth's diameter as 12,742 km (though it bulges by about 43 km in the center), we're saying that's 100 px. So if my basic algebra is right (no promises) you can convert the above km values to px by dividing by 127.42.
Is anyone else a little bothered by the fact that the reported speed was 1/5 the speed of light, yet the flyby necessarily increased to well over the speed of light in order to actually get you to Mars before you got bored and closed the tab? Traveling <i>at</i> the speed of light would have taken 5-20 minutes. Traveling slower than that would have taken even longer...
It bothers me a little that they show the motion against a starfield like that -- the stars are so far away that they won't shift perceptibly even on a journey to mars.<p>I mean, I don't have any <i>better</i> ideas, but given that the whole point is to give an idea of scale I wish they'd come up with something else. :)
This simple graphic of the Earth and Moon and the distance between them, to scale, is also pretty thought provoking<p><a href="http://www.traipse.com/earth_and_moon/index.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.traipse.com/earth_and_moon/index.html</a><p>edit: just large image:
<a href="http://www.traipse.com/earth_and_moon/earth_and_moon_1280.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://www.traipse.com/earth_and_moon/earth_and_moon_1280.jp...</a>
Here is a photo of the Earth and Moon, with the to-scale distance between them. It makes a great desktop background:<p><a href="http://www.traipse.com/earth_and_moon/" rel="nofollow">http://www.traipse.com/earth_and_moon/</a>
Hey guys, Dave here, made the site.. Really amazed by how much coverage this thing has got, and really surprised by how poor my maths were. Not surprising given I failed both maths and physics at college. Really happy to be inspiring debate, I've gone over my sums and given it another shot<p>Thanks!
Cool.<p>Unfortunately though, on my regular setup of Firefox on Windows, the background image abruptly 'runs out' shortly after the "You're currently travelling at 70000 pixels/second" message appears, leaving me with a blank white screen. I believe this is due to this browser bug I've just found out about: <a href="https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=816917" rel="nofollow">https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=816917</a><p>Fine on Chrome though.
My favourite scale of the universe picture:<p><a href="http://scaleofuniverse.com/universe-medium.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://scaleofuniverse.com/universe-medium.jpg</a>
<i>"At the current state of space technology, it will take at least 240 days to get to Mars"</i><p>Uh, no. The person who put this together obviously hasn't read a lot about proposed plans for Mars missions or even understands how transfer orbits work. 150 days is a likely practical limit for today's technology, but it's not a hard limit. Spend a little more fuel, and you could make it 149 days.<p><a href="http://www.universetoday.com/14841/how-long-does-it-take-to-get-to-mars/" rel="nofollow">http://www.universetoday.com/14841/how-long-does-it-take-to-...</a>
I'd love to see the Sun included on the opposite side of the scale. Its diameter is 109 times that of earth, making it 10900 pixels. Would be just as impressive a demonstration.
One thing that's always gotten to me about this distance is what it means for communication latency. Mars is 20 light-minutes away. If we sent colonists, communication would be a 40-minute round trip. No phone calls home, no way to have a chat with friends or loved ones; at best they could send a message, and wait 40 minutes for a reply. That's far away.
Oh this is fantastic! My father teaches astronomy to kids (he has a mobile planetarium that he takes around schools [1]) and one of the main pain points he has mentioned is communicating a sense of scale to them.<p>This is elegant because it mixes the concept of "imagine this orange is the earth, mars would be in <nearby town>" within the constraints of a web page.<p>Kids have difficulty visualising distances in an abstract way - but <i>time</i> is much simpler. And the length of the scroll to Mars really emphasises this.<p>Great visualisation.<p>1. <a href="http://www.starlincs.co.uk" rel="nofollow">http://www.starlincs.co.uk</a>
It's nice but his scale is wrong. He states that the Earth is 6371 km large, while in reality, it's twice that, as 6371 km is just the radius of the Earth, and what you really see is its diameter.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the scale model of the solar system strewn around the Boston metro area. If you live there, it's pretty fun to visit all the planets. One year the MIT Mystery Hunt had a puzzle related to it.
Brilliant. I never actually reached mars - just the gut wrenching distance to the moon made me realise how amazing the Apollo program was - whatever gets us to Mars ...
Though not as cool as this, I used a similar scrolling idea back in 2011 to visualize a star that was one million times the mass of our sun — <a href="http://vjk2005.tumblr.com/post/4497783697/a-star-half-a-million-times-the-mass-of-our-sun-was" rel="nofollow">http://vjk2005.tumblr.com/post/4497783697/a-star-half-a-mill...</a>
Bug Report: I'm afraid this crashed between the Moon and Mars, just as some "you are travelling" text came in on the LHS and then it just went to whitescreen. Firefox 19.0.2 on Win7-64Home. In case you can catch it. (yeah ok so my laptop's not Linux, sue me!)
If the Earth radius was 100 pixels, the average depth of the ocean (~4km) would be less than 0.1 pixels. I once had a professor hold up piece of paper and say "this is my scale model of the pacific ocean". Took me a while to realize he wasn't joking.
Mars is pretty far, but 240 days doesn't sound so bad. In the age of explorers, the first human sailors to circumnavigate the earth took 4 years to do it. A handful of them even survived the journey!
You should speed up the rate a bit when going to mars, and just tell the user that the velocity is higher now. It takes up too much of our time, to be honest.
Reminds me of this Bill Nye episode<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97Ob0xR0Ut8" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97Ob0xR0Ut8</a>
it says it is traveling at 1/10 th of light speed. it takes less than minute to get to Mars in pixels, but from other sources I know it takes 13 minutes for radio signal to get to mars. Something does not play here.
please also mark the Lagrange Points
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point</a><p>plus Sun, that would be really cool!!