Are todays astronomers/engineers having easy time?

Question

they can use software's to do most of their calculations and they can easily do a trajectory while having a cup of coffee unlike thier older counterparts who use to think alot and do the matematics manually.

what are the latest sofwares they use?

Answer 1

Yes, they do use software, but keep in mind how much more advanced everything is now. Although engineers before the computer age calculated everything by hand, they weren't building controlable robots to land on a different planet, or satellites that orbit Earth and reflect signals, and take very high resolution photographs. So I would say they balence one another out.

It is because of the emerging software that is propelling space exploration further. As for astronomy, I used to use sky charts as my primary reference until I was about 10, but trust me, it isn't a skill I will soon forget. But now I plug my telescopes into my computer, and control it there. And I have observed a lot more than I did using a sky chart and calculating the planet's positions by hand, because I did do that for some time. I could still get a good observation night with only a sky chart... or with just a telescope, I have a pretty good handle on the night sky (thanks to the sky charts) but I can at least 50 additional galaxies using my computer.

I think that using the basics before using the computer is a good idea. My math teacher makes us do everything by hand. We don't use calculators at all in his class... even in geometry and algebra II. Although it is time consuming, I retain the concepts a lot better. Once I do get into more advanced math, I will have to use a calculator, but I will never forget the concepts I learned doing everything by hand.

And keep in mind, there is a great amount of work put into these programs. I write C++ and C# programs all the time, and it is no easy task. Even writing a simple weight calculator that will calculate weight on different planets took over two straight hours in C++. Really when you write a program, you are doing twice the work of doing all the functions by hand, but when you get finished, it takes almost no thought at all to perform functions such as calculating trajectory.

I do feel, in a way, that the scientific community is becoming too dependant on technology. I have always wondered how an emergency room could even function without electricity for maybe 30 minutes. The doctors are so dependant on computers that they couldn't even adapt to there being no palm pilots, or computers. In my city, all the hospital records are kept on computers, and through and private network among all hospitals. There are no actual documents anymore, its all computerized. So far its just a test, and they are thinking about spreading this to diferent states. Personally, I see good in this, but the whole paper file shouldn't be replaced in my opinion. But that's a whole other debate.

Answer 2

I would not call them "easy", but certainly "exciting".  Yes, we do have more very powerful tools than ever before.  But at the same time, we take on much tougher challenges than the engineers in the past.  The level of difficulty of today's engineering problems and solutions goes hand-in-hand with the development of new tools.  New areas of engineering and new technologies emerge as our knowledge and capabilities increase - nanotechnology, bio-engineering, advanced robotics, etc. are fields that would not be possible without the powerful tools we have today.  Engineering has never been easy, nor it will ever be.  We, engineers, will make sure that it remains as challenging as possible.

As for latest software, engineering is such a wide area that there is not enough space to list it here.  In my field (mechanical engineering and project management) probably the moist exciting tools are the ones related to Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) such as Catia, Smart Plants, etc., mechanical design/modelling tools such as Solid Edge / Works, and all kinds of simulation programs for CFD, stress analysis.  Civil engineers have their own set of "toys", electrical engineers another, and so on.

Answer 3

Today's astronomers and engineers are not simply letting computers do their work for them.  Yes, today engineers and scientists have access to supercomputers in the double-digit teraFLOPS range, but those computers come about because the tasks engineers and scientists are assigned require them.

A good example is Boeing's 787 Dreamliner.  The goal was to make an airliner some 30 percent more fuel efficient than its predecessor, the 737.  That is a very daunting task.  It can only be done with the computational fluid and structural dynamics analysis that needs huge computers to run on.  The software performs the calculations, but it still falls to the engineers to think carefully about what calculations to perform.  One popular software package for computational solutions is the ANSYS product.

Similarly in the astronomy field, supercomputers are used to solve n-body gravitational problems, mapping trans-Neptunian objects, for example, or looking for rogue asteroids that pose a collision hazard.  These are tasks that no scientist would have dared attempt with the computational tools.  There is, for example, no closed-form solutions for n-body gravitation.  The ability of supercomputers to reveal high-order harmonics in orbital mechanics has opened up a whole new realm of thinking that simply wasn't possible before.  Typically these computational models are custom built.

At any given point in time, engineers and scientists are being asked to do that which is just slightly out of their existing capacity, such as lower the cost of buildings, or locate new tiny objects in space, or reduce fuel use by drastic margins.  To say they just sit and drink coffee while computers do their work is, honestly, rather insulting.