From: "Kevin Fetter" <kfetter@yahoo.com> > It says NanoSail-D2 was launched on 20 November, 2010, but it > decayed on 31 December, 1969 Many (most?) times on computers are stored as seconds since jan 1, 1970 at 0:00. In java usually milliseconds since the same date. Most of these values are stored as integers that can be negative or positive although the intent is (usually) to never have negative values. Despite this there are lots of time/date functions that will display a time of -1 as dec 31, 1969. I suspect the database that stores this information is not using standard sql dates but instead "epoch" dates (seconds since 1970) and that someone put a -1 in this database field. So probably if it told you what *time* the satellite decayed it would have said dec 31, 1969 11:59 pm. Programmers often use 0 or -1 to store an "unknown" state (rather than have a separate variable). - George Roberts http://gr5.org _______________________________________________ Seesat-l mailing list http://mailman.satobs.org/mailman/listinfo/seesat-l
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