NOT FOR PUBLICATION PLEASE PASS TO SCIENCE EDITOR Dear Science Editor, You are undoubtedly aware that the latest shuttle mission (STS-100) carried up a manipulator arm for the International Space Station (ISS). Despite the impression that AP wires and NASA PAO releases might leave in your mind, this arm was designed and built in SI ("metric") units. The URL that follows is for a NASA web page http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/station/assembly/elements/mss/subsystems.html and the web pages provided by the builder (MDRobotics) corroborate the units of measurement actually used. I, for one, would appreciate anything you can do to counter the misimpression people might receive from the "English" materials you're using in publishing AP wires. If you'll check the page above, you'll see that the arm is 17.6 m long and carries a manipulator that is 3.5 m long. The power values given are in watts, which are SI ("metric"), of course. The loads shown are in newtons (N); 1 N is the force needed to lift and hold a small apple of mass 100 g (0.100 kg). So the tip load is essentially the force that would be needed to lift a large man on Earth's surface. Further down, the mass handling capability is listed as 116,000 kg which NASA obligingly converts (to too many digits) as 255,736 pounds. The conversion of kilograms to metric tons (tonnes) is easy of course since 1 metric ton equals 1000 kg; it is 116 metric tons in this case. You should note that the NASA page uses the term "weight" in lieu of "mass", which is rather colloquial and more appropriate for commerce than for technical matters. Also, the operation speeds shown are of course in SI ("metric") but the formatting is improper. They should be: Unloaded: 37 cm/s (or "centimeters per second" -- no / symbol) Station Assembly - 2 cm/s [This is a NASA typo; it should be 6 cm/s] EVA Support - 15 cm/s Orbiter - 1.2 cm/s I sincerely hope that the Post and Courier can exert some local influence on what is published in its pages to avoid publishing misleading materials. Let's honor our Canadian neighbors by not dumbing down the units of measurement they (and the NASA specifications) used. More importantly, let's make sure that our readers and their children know that modern science, engineering, and commerce are done in the International System of Units (SI), also known as "the modern metric system". Charlestonians are smart enough to understand those units. sincerely, James R. Frysinger -- James R. Frysinger University/College of Charleston 10 Captiva Row Dept. of Physics and Astronomy Charleston, SC 29407 66 George Street 843.225.0805 Charleston, SC 29424 http://www.cofc.edu/~frysingj [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cert. Adv. Metrication Specialist 843.953.7644