Posted by James R. Frysinger on January 03, 2000 at 18:14:21:
In Reply to: Re: weigt of Hubble posted by Ed Cheng on January 02, 2000 at 15:41:59:
> The Hubble weighs about 24000 lbs on Earth. That would be about 11000 kg.
> It is about the size of a big tractor-trailer truck (I don't know if there
> is a metric equivalent for this unit :>).
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-The figure 11 000 kg is metric. Due to the ease of using prefixes in the international metric system (the SI), you could (if you wished) eliminate those zeros by moving the decimal place left three places and writing this as 11 Mg. All prefixes scale by powers of ten and so moving the decmal place makes scaling easy. You can't do that, of course, with ounces and pounds.
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-There is a metric unit that is not part of the International System of Units (SI) but is acceptable for use with the SI. That is what we in the U.S. call the metric ton and most others call the tonne (its symbol is "t"). It is equal to 1000 kg, so you could say the HST weighs 11 metric tons. There is no ambiguity with that as there is between short tons and long tons.
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-So 11 Mg or 11 000 kg are perfectly good and 11 t (or 11 metric tons) is acceptable as well.
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