Season 1 Errata: Mistakes Were Made … Even By Us

Dr. Stu here.  We make every effort to ensure accuracy in each episode, but sometimes mistakes get by us.  We catch most of those before the show even goes to air, but sometimes even that’s not enough.  We will put out a Season 1 corrections episode when we are reasonably confident that everything has been caught.  In the meantime, we’re going to list corrections here.

Before the Show Aired (you never heard these mistakes):

  • Episode 24, the pronunciation of “Charon:”  I had stated when we recorded that the Greek is a hard “K” sound (as in “kite”) but many of us pronounce the name of the satellite with a softer “sh” sound (as in “Cher” or “share”).  I had stated this was because the discoverer of Charon, James Christy, has a wife whose name is “Sharon” and so this was a bit of an homage to her.  However, this is incorrect: His wife’s name is Charlene.  Same idea, but wrong name.
  • Episode 20, hypervelocity impacts in crater formation:  In a slip of the tongue, I said that impactors hit planets at 10s of meters per second and make hypervelocity impacts.  I was off by a few orders of magnitude:  It’s 10s of kilometers per second.  Super-fast.

After the Show Aired (mistakes in the episodes you downloaded):

  • Episode 25, GPS satellites’ orbits:  I incorrectly stated that GPS satellites are geosynchronous, meaning they are stationary relative to the ground, orbiting at the same rate Earth rotates.  That’s incorrect: GPS satellites are too close to Earth for that, and they orbit roughly twice per Earth day, or one orbit roughly every 12 hours.