• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Why NASA Only Uses A Handful Of The 62.8 Trillion Known Digits Of Pi In Its Calculations

March 14, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

It’s March 14 – Pi Day as the date format used in the US and only a handful of other countries reads 3/14. And 3.14 is usually what you need to know when you are doing calculations that involve circular things. For example, working out how much more pizza you get by ordering one 18-inch instead of two 12 inches.

But if you were in the business of sending spacecraft around the Solar System, like NASA is, you might think that you would use many more digits of pi. Maybe not all 62.8 trillion known digits but a significant amount to get to high precision.

Advertisement

It turns out, though, that the amount needed to get to high precision is a significantly smaller number of digits than you might think. NASA uses 15 decimal places and by counting the 3, you have a total of 16 digits. And that is more than enough. NASA’s Marc Rayman, who was the chief engineer on the Dawn mission, has revealed why you do not need more.

“To start, let me answer your question directly. For [the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s] highest accuracy calculations, which are for interplanetary navigation, we use 3.141592653589793,” he said in an article originally published in 2016 and then updated in 2022. “I think we can even see that there are no physically realistic calculations scientists ever perform for which it is necessary to include nearly as many decimal points as you asked about.”

He gives three examples of why you do not need that many digits. One is Voyager 1. The spacecraft is currently suffering a malfunction we hope it will recover from. It is located about 24,371,570,000 kilometers (15,143,730,000 miles) from the Sun. If you were to use that distance as a radius and calculate the circumference, using more digits of pi would only add slightly over 1 centimeter (0.4 inches) to your value.

The second example is about taking a car around the circumference of the Earth, making a similar point but with a discrepancy that it is much smaller, tens of thousands of times thinner than a hair. But it is the third example that is truly mind-blowing. It’s about calculating the circumference of a circle with a radius as big as the visible universe to the precision of the smallest atom.

Advertisement

“The radius of the universe is about 46 billion light years. Now let me ask (and answer!) a different question: How many digits of pi would we need to calculate the circumference of a circle with a radius of 46 billion light years to an accuracy equal to the diameter of a hydrogen atom, the simplest atom? It turns out that 37 decimal places (38 digits, including the number 3 to the left of the decimal point) would be quite sufficient,” Rayman explained.

If you want a more hands-on approach to this precision and you don’t just want to check ours or NASA’s math, you can play around with The NASA Pi Day Challenge. This year, it includes a throwback to the cat video that NASA received from Deep Space.

Pi remains a fascinating number that keeps popping up in equations describing crucial principles and phenomena in the universe. It has an infinite number of non-repeating digits, which means any number sequence is in there. Somewhere in pi, there’s your birthday right next to the birthday of Dolly Parton (January 19, 1946). And that is pretty neat!

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Tennis-Scrappy Sakkari survives gruelling three-setter to beat Andreescu
  2. Cricket-NZ players reach Dubai after ‘specific, credible threat’ derailed Pakistan tour
  3. Soccer-Liverpool’s Alexander-Arnold ruled out of Man City game
  4. What Are Baby Platypuses Called?

Source Link: Why NASA Only Uses A Handful Of The 62.8 Trillion Known Digits Of Pi In Its Calculations

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Alien Abduction Or A Trick Of The Mind? A Down To Earth Explanation Of Close Encounters
  • Six Months Into Trump’s Presidency, Americans Report Record Low Pride In Being American
  • TikToker Unknowingly Handles Extremely Venomous Cone Snail And Lives To Tell The Tale
  • Scientists Sequence Oldest Egyptian DNA To Date, From A Whopping 4,800 Years Ago
  • “Uncharted Waters”: Large Hadron Collider Begins Colliding Oxygen For The First Time
  • 125,000-Year-Old Neanderthal “Fat Factory” Shows They Gorged On Bone Grease
  • On July 3, Earth Will Reach Its Farthest Point From The Sun – 152 Million Kilometers Away
  • NASA’s Perseverance Rover May Have Recorded Evidence Of Electrified Dust Devils On Mars
  • “Hymn to Babylon”: Missing Mesopotamian Text Dating Back Nearly 3,000 Years Discovered
  • Multiple New Species Of Cute Spotty And Stripy Geckos Discovered In Remote Cambodia
  • ChatGPT May Be Surprisingly Good At Piloting Spacecraft, Taking 2nd Place In Spaceflight Competition
  • Incredible Supernova Finding Shows That “Double-Detonation Mechanism” Happens In Nature
  • Soda Cans, Asthma Inhalers, And… Water Bottles? All Things That Could Explode In Your Car This Summer
  • Video: Is There An Ideal Sleeping Position?
  • If You Look Up At The Right Time Today, You Will See A Giant “X” On The Moon
  • We May Have Our Third Interstellar Visitor And It’s Nothing Like The Previous Two
  • Orcas Filmed Kissing (With Tongues) In The Wild For The First Time
  • How Easy Is It For A Country To Change Its Time Zone?
  • Earth’s First Commercial Space Station Set To Launch In 2026
  • Black Hole Moon: Rogue Planets With Weird Signatures Could Be A Sign Of Advanced Alien Life
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version