What is a “radiosonde”? What is “sidereal time”?

A radiosonde is the thing hanging at the bottom of a weather balloon that reads telemetry and sends it to a ground station. Also, one that reads ozone is called an “ozonesonde” (and, now, there’s a chance that my first daughter will be named “Aurorasonde”).

sidereal (“sidd-ear-ee-al” time) is a measure of time based on Earth’s perspective of distant stars. This is used to fix how we make distant observations. I wonder if this is a general system that can be adapted for any planet? Otherwise, sidereal time would be totally useless on Mars.

Radiosonde

Sidereal time

Leave a Reply

Please log in using one of these methods to post your comment:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s