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from the that's-the-combination-to-my-luggage! dept.
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/news/2016/3/16/how-many-decimals-of-pi-do-we-really-need/
Earlier this week, we received this question from a fan on Facebook who wondered how many decimals of the mathematical constant pi (π) NASA-JPL scientists and engineers use when making calculations:
Does JPL only use 3.14 for its pi calculations? Or do you use more decimals like say: 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307816406286208998628034825342117067982148086513282306647093844609550582231725359408128481117450284102701938521105559644622948954930381964428810975665933446128475648233786783165271201909145648566923460348610454326648213393607260249141273724587006606315588174881520920962829254091715364367892590360
We posed this question to the director and chief engineer for NASA's Dawn mission, Marc Rayman. Here's what he said:
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday August 16 2019, @02:06AM
Common measures? You mean the uncommon non-SI units used only by the 3rd, 26th, and 124th largest nations in the world? (okay, and several others in common parlance, but rarely for real work)
But yes, ironically enough binary is better suited to power-of-two fractional measures than decimal ones. Ironically, because typically there's no way to input or read those values except as gratuitously long decimal values. I've used a few pieces of software that will actually accept a value like 3+7/8 in a numerical field, but they're so few and far between as to be really noteworthy.