Gregory Bennett

Hello and a request

Hello, Greg. I just read some of your comments on the EVA page. Good stuff. Thanks!
Your comments also led me to believe that you might be able to weigh in with some authority on a discussion going on here and here. The STS-115 mission article brought to a head the issue of time, and we're having a discussion about how to cite times in space mission articles on WikiPedia.
I anxiously await your input on the matter.
--3Idiot 12:37, 15 September 2006 (UTC)

Hi , 3Idiot. Thanks for the nice words about my comments on the EVA page. The tricky part is figuring out how to report what really happened based on verifiable sources. That's just one example of how important facts can be lost forever because nobody ever publishes an article about them.

I looked up the discussion of the date and time and contributed by 2 cents worth. In general, I'd say that if you're relcalulating things just for the Wikipedia, then you're probably not thinking encyclopedically, so to speak. :)

I favor making things easy for the person who is reading the encyclopedia. If NASA is reporting things in mixed time zones, then that's what should be documented in the Wikipedia. -- Greg 03:37, 20 September 2006 (UTC)

Silly Story from Mission Control

Here's another amusing anecdote related to the the time zone question.

Once upon a time I was working in mission control, in the Mission Evaluation Room as the shift supervisor on the EVA and Flight Crew Systems Consoles.

I had a dual-timezone watch that told me the time in Houston and in Moscow. Obviously I was in Houston, and we needed to coordinate our work with the guys in Moscow. Down in the MER, the Russian console was right behind me. That turned out to be very convenient because if I wanted something from the Russians, all I had to do was reach behind me and rattle a chair.

"Hey, the KURS antenna didn't deploy. What do we do?"

"Try having one of the astronauts kick it."

(That's exactly what we did. It worked. The astronaut almost got whacked by the antenna when it deployed.)

I also had a separate clock in my briefcase that kept track of the time my brain was in--I was on the planning shift so I was on console in the middle of the night. In preparation for the missions, I synched my biological clock to time zones advancing around the world, even to the point of keeping up with news and weather in Thailand and other exotic spots.

I found that 26-hour days worked best for me, so I just needed a few days to shift ahead until I was in synch with the graveyard shift at the MCC.

The important point here is that UTC wasn't really on the radar. There's an outside chance that somewhere, some day, someone is going to want to figure out that an on-orbit event happened at the same time as some other thing, but otherwise, I really don't see any point in recording it.

But, as I said in the Space Missions project talk page, including UTC as a parenthetical note is mostly harmless. I see it as useless clutter, but even that provides some entertainment value. At least I find the desire to show how international and ecumenical we are, even when it's pointless, to be source of amusement. :)

-- Greg 19:07, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

Hi Greg. I hope you don't mind my cluttering your anecdote with a reply! You're right that, for people like yourself actively engaged in the operation of a mission, knowing the times in the various control centers is more important than knowing the UTC time. But for Wikipedia, the situation is just a bit different. Wikipedia editors use a variety of different sources for their contributions. If one editor references e.g. a CBS News article, and CBS uses EDT for reporting events, that editor will want to use EDT for convenience. So too would an editor who uses JSC press releases. But an editor using MCC status reports will want to use CDT. As the human space exploration enterprise begins to include more international partners, this will only become more of an issue. The Columbus control center is in Germany, right? So ESA press releases may well use that TZ. JAXA will be in the mix soon too. Either Wikipedia readers are all going to need to learn to convert from multiple timezones, or Wikipedia editors are. I favor putting the burden on editors rather than readers. (sdsds - talk) 19:05, 11 August 2007 (UTC)

Sdsds, it might make some sense to report the time of a current event in UTC, but that's the end of the positive aspects of doing this. Historical milestones should be reported in the time frame in which they occurred.

MTS2

You recently edited ModTheSims2. Please help wikipedia come to a concencus as to weather or not this article merits inclusion in wikipedia at Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/ModTheSims2_(2nd_nomination) Thanks. --Kunzite 21:45, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

Oops. Someone announced the recommendation for deleted was dropped because no concensus had been reached before I was even aware of the discussion. Greg 09:03, 12 October 2006 (UTC)