This week on Totally Tintin: it’s high fives all round as Tintin and company finally get to the moon to find intrigue, betrayal, treachery and silliness.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
This week on Totally Tintin: it’s high fives all round as Tintin and company finally get to the moon to find intrigue, betrayal, treachery and silliness.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Wasn’t it Hercules who cleaned the stable, not Odysseus?
I was intrigued by Dave’s suggestion that Haddock should be more attracted to the rocket than to Adonis, and also pretty sure that this wasn’t right, so I dusted off my high-school physics brain to work it out. The basic Newtonian formula for the gravitational attraction between two objects is F = G(m1xm2)/r^2, meaning that the force of attraction (in newtons) is equal to the product of the masses of the two objects, divided by the square of the distance between their centres, multiplied by the gravitational constant (6.673×10^−11).
Distances and masses we don’t know, but I’d assume a mass of around 80kg for Haddock. The mass of Adonis is given by Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2101_Adoni) as between 0.13–1.8×10^12, so we’ll need to do a couple of calculations to cover this range. I worked with the mass of the rocket as equal to the launch weight of a Saturn V (2970000 kg), although I would expect this to be much lower for our nuclear-powered rocket. The initial distance between Haddock and the rocket appears to be about 10 metres but I rounded this up to 20. The distance to Adonis is harder to estimate, so I worked with 1 kilometre. I was pretty sure that Dave was wrong here, so I could afford to be generous in my estimates in favour of Dave’s hypothesis.
Plugging these in to the formula, I get the following:
Attraction between Haddock and Rocket = 0.00003963762 N
Attraction between Haddock and Adonis (Low mass) = 0.000693992 N
Attraction between Haddock and Adonis (High mass) = 0.00960912 N
(Better minds than mine, feel free to take issue with my mathematics!)
In plain English, if Haddock is 20 metres from the rocket and 1km from Adonis he is between 17 and 242 times MORE attracted to Adonis than to the rocket. So; no, Dave. Hergé has this right. Except, of course, that the rocket will be pretty much equally attracted, and so Haddock and Rocket will move as one towards Adonis.
It is, however, extremely unlikely that Haddock would go into orbit – he is much more likely to trace a spiral path down to impact with the asteroid. I’m not enough of a physicist to work that out (or any physicist at all), but I can tell you that if he dropped straight down onto Adonis from rest at a height of 1 km, it would take him 1 hour 48 minutes and he would land at a speed of about 2 km/h. The fall wouldn’t kill him: he’d bounce. He’d probably keep bouncing off and on, in fact, long after his air ran out and he died horribly.
Really nice work there Dylan!
That’s amazing! Hats off.
I suspected Dave was wrong because the mass of Adonis would be so much more than the rocket but as I said to myself at the time ‘I wouldn’t even know how to start calculating it properly’. Luckily we have people like Dylan.
Dylan, you the real MVP!
What bugged me about the book was the villain… how can you take seriously a balding four-eyes in a bow tie in an empty room? And how is he connected to Tintin’s nemesis, the villainous Fish, who I am sure will appear any day now?
At the same time it’s interesting because this story sees Tintin entering the Cold War (we all know which side Svldania and Borduria is on) which we will see more of later in the Calculus Affair and anticipates the US/Soviet rivalry of the space race years before Sputnick.
All hail Borduria!
Do you have a link to the book David talked about at the beginning of the episode, the Benoit Peeters complete edition with the various versions all together? I’ve been googling but I’m not having much luck, and my French is terrible enough I may have found it and passed it by because I didn’t understand what I was looking at.
Hi Les,
Here’s a link to Peeters’ Facebook page with the information and a picture of the book. There’s not much more information about it out there except that it’s due for release in November of this year according to French Amazon.
Awesome, thanks!
Every time Tintin risks his life to save snowy, like going after him in the cave, I think of Dave risking his life to save that Frisbee.