Astronomical Unit

An Astronomical Unit is a unit of measurement of distance, frequently used to measure inter-planetary distances.

• It is an astrographic scale measurement.
• It is a standard Imperial metric.

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Please refer to the following AAB Library Data for more information:
Starship:

• Speed of Travel
  • Astronomical Unit (AU)
  • FTL
  • Light Speed (c)
  • Light-week (lw)
  • Light-year (ly)
  • NAFAL (STL)
  • Parsec (pc)

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Description (Specifications)

One Astronomical Unit is about 150 million kilometers (or, more precisely, 149¨597 870 691 ± 30 meters), or about 93 million miles.

• The standard abbreviation is AU.
• One Astronomical Unit is approximately equal to 500 light-seconds.

History & Background (Dossier)

Because the definition of a Parsec originally relied upon the Astronomical Unit, the AU has become a standard unit of measurement within the Imperium.

Imperial vs. Solomani Astronomical Unit Usage

The Solomani define the Astronomical Unit as the distance between Terra and Sol, the system's primary star.

Modern Imperial usage bases the AU on the distance between Capital and its sun, which happens to have an almost identical orbital distance to that of Terra around Sol. This definition of the AU was broadly adopted following the Solomani Rim War, in order to avoid the use of specifically Terracentric metrics.

References & Contributors (Sources)

This page uses content from Wikipedia. The original article was at Astronomical_unit. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. The text of Wikipedia is available under the Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

This list of sources was used by the Traveller Wiki Editorial Team and individual contributors to compose this article. Copyrighted material is used under license from Far Future Enterprises or by permission of the author. The page history lists all of the contributions.

• Marc Miller. Imperial Encyclopedia (Game Designers Workshop, 1987), TBD.
• EXTERNAL LINK: A Kuiper Belt Glossary by Jeol Parker
• Traveller Wiki Editorial Team
• Author & Contributor: Lord (Marquis) and Master of Sophontology Maksim-Smelchak of the Ministry of Science