My Science School

Either now, or when you were younger, you would have surely played with jigsaw puzzles. But have you ever tried to piece together parts from different puzzles and see what you can end up with? What if the same thing actually happened on a celestial scale? The result probably would look something like Miranda.

One of Uranus’ five major moons, Miranda is the innermost and smallest among them. It was discovered by Gerard P. Kuiper on February 16, 1948 in telescopic photos of the Uranian system. Kuiper worked at the McDonald Observatory in western Texas and the photos were obtained using the Otto Struve Telescope at the University of Texas in Austin.

Shakespeare connect

Weeks within its discovery, Miranda’s motion around Uranus was confirmed, on March 1, 1948. With Uranus’ previous moons Ariel and Umbriel discovered in 1851, this made Miranda the first satellite of Uranus to be discovered in nearly 100 years.

Like Uranus’ other major moons Oberon, Titania, Ariel and Umbriel, Miranda’s name too was related to the works of English poet William Shakespeare. Miranda was named for the daughter of Prospero in Shakespeare’s play The Tempest.

At about one-seventh the size of our Earth’s moon, Miranda is among the smallest objects in the Solar System to have achieved hydrostatic equilibrium. Taking 1.4 days to complete an orbit around Uranus and with an orbital period that is also 34 hours, it is tidally locked with Uranus and hence has the same side facing the planet at all times.

Five features

What makes Miranda mysterious, however, is the fact that it has one of the weirdest and most varied landscapes among all extraterrestrial bodies. Scientists agree upon at least five types of geological features on Miranda. These include craters, coronae (oval-shaped features), regiones (areas strongly differentiated in colour or albedo), rupes (scarps or canyons) and sulci (complex parallel grooved terrain).

There are younger, lightly cratered regions and older, heavily cratered regions on Miranda. There are three large coronae in the southern hemisphere, which are kind of unique among objects known in the solar system. These racetrack-like grooved structures are named Arden, Elsinore and Inverness, all locations in Shakespeare’s plays.

Largest cliff in Solar System

The largest known cliff in the Solar System is on Miranda and is known as Verona Rupes, named after the setting of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. With the cliff face estimated to be 20 km high, this rupees is as many as 12 times as deep as the Grand Canyon in the U.S.

As Miranda is almost invisible to most amateur telescopes, almost everything we know about it is through the Voyager 2 mission. The only flyby of the Uranian system so far was achieved by Voyager 2 in 1986, providing us with a sneak peek of Miranda’s geology and geography.

Considering only the southern hemisphere of Miranda faced the sun during Voyager 2’s flyby and the northern hemisphere was in darkness, only the southern hemisphere has been studied to some extent. Theories have been proposed and discussed as to what might be the reasons for Miranda’s varied geological features. But these mysteries will be solved only with more information and that might well require further missions to Uranus and its system.

 

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• One of the youngest mountaineers to climb Mount Everest.


• A black belt in karate.


• A former member of the Territorial Army Reservist for the Special Air Service.


• And, an acclaimed television anchor.

That’s Bear Grylls for you. The adventurist, who hosts the popular television series Man vs Wild possesses an impressive curriculum vitae – dare-devilish and courageous!

But before we get going, here’s one disclaimer – his actual name is Edward Michael Grylls. When he was just one week old, his elder sister named him ‘Bear’, which over the years became a household name.

A dream called Mount Everest

Hailing from a cricketing family – his great grandfather, James-Augustus Ford and grandfather Neville Ford were first-class cricketers – Grylls was interested in sports right from his childhood. And that eventually kindled his interest in the world of adventure.

When he was eight-years old, his father had given him a poster of the mountain for his bedroom wall and ever since, he wanted to climb it someday. But it was not an easy task.

While studying at the Eton College, London, the U.K., he founded a mountaineering club, and at 23, he climbed the Mount Everest, becoming one of the youngest mountaineers to do so. Pursuing a childhood dream, Grylls battled the odds to reach the peak just 18 months after breaking three vertebrae in a parachuting accident.

This, by his own admission, was a life-changing experience.

To ensure that he was acclimatised to the higher altitudes in the Himalayas, Grylls climbed the Ama Dablam – peak once described by Sir Edmund Hillary as ‘unclimbable’ in 1997.

That was the beginning of his adventures.

Air, there, everywhere

There are many folds to Grylls’ story. If scaling mountains is one aspect, traversing the globe is another. He led a team to circumnavigate the British Isles on jet skis in 2000. It took him around 30 days, but he did it to raise money for the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNU). In 2003, when Grylls set sail for the North Atlantic in an inflatable boat, along with three other crew, not many thought he would be able to complete the journey. But in three weeks time, the team completed 3,500 miles to achieve the incredible feat.

The journeys have never been easy, but with passion and fearlessness, Grylls has made them look like child’s play.

Following his favourite line – remember, courage and kindness and never give up – Grylls embarked on a record-setting para-jet para-motor expedition in the Himalayas near Mount Everest in 2007. This not only helped him attain great heights in his career, but also set the tone for his Guinness Book of World Records feat. Along with the double amputee, Al Hodgson and Freddy MacDonald, Grylls undertook the longest continuous indoor freeball. The previous record was 1 hour 36 minutes by a U.S. team, but Grylls and his men, surpassed the record by a few seconds.

Grylls says that the journeys to the Amazon, the Sahara and the Arctic have been hair-rising moments for him. And these are the memories that keep him going…

Alps, here we come!

So it doesn’t come as a surprise that Gyrlls’ idea of a perfect holiday is skiing and paragliding trips to the Alps. For someone who hops around the steepest of the mountains, paragliding in the Alps does look like an easy affair. After all, it’s the call of the wild that beckons him.

Lights, camera, action…

At 45, Grylls has written quite a few books chronicling his adventures. But he became a household name with his television series, Man vs Wild. The series featured him dropping into forbidding places, showing viewers how to survive. While it became immensely popular across the globe, Grylls travelled to India last year to shoot an episode with Prime Minister, Narendra Modi. The two spent days at the Jim Corbett National Park in Uttarakhand and the episode was aired in more than 180 countries. Recently, he also shot with superstar Rajinikanth, at the Bandipur National Park in Karnataka. Grylls’ heroics have earned him a huge fan base in India.

Grylls’ adventures have helped him fulfill his childhood dreams. But Grylls is always on the lookout for his next adventure!

 

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A Tale of Two Cities, novel by Charles Dickens, published both serially and in book form in 1859. The story is set in the late 18th century against the background of the French Revolution. Although Dickens borrowed from Thomas Carlyle’s history, The French Revolution, for his sprawling tale of London and revolutionary Paris, the novel offers more drama than accuracy. The scenes of large-scale mob violence are especially vivid, if superficial in historical understanding.

Dickens' best-known work of historical fiction, A Tale of Two Cities is regularly cited as the best-selling novel of all time. In 2003, the novel was ranked 63rd on the BBC's The Big Read poll. The novel has been adapted for film, television, radio, and the stage, and has continued to have an influence on popular culture.

 

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McMahon Line, frontier between Tibet and Assam in British India, negotiated between Tibet and Great Britain at the end of the Shimla Conference (October 1913–July 1914) and named for the chief British negotiator, Sir Henry McMahon. 

The Chinese have maintained this position to the present day and also have claimed that Chinese territory extends southward to the base of the Himalayan foothills. This frontier controversy with independent India led to the Sino-Indian hostilities of October–November 1962. In that conflict the Chinese forces occupied Indian Territory south of the McMahon Line but subsequently withdrew after a cease-fire had been achieved.

 

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Janus was the Roman god of doors, choices, beginnings and endings. The first month of the year is called January after him. He is usually depicted with two faces, one on each side of the head. He was one of the earliest gods of Rome, sometimes referred to as the “god of gods” or diuom deo.

Janus was a porter of heaven and a guardian god of gates and doors. He was the Roman God of Beginnings and his name was an obvious choice for the first month of the year.

The origins on Janus vary and unlike other Roman and Greek gods, Janus may have been a mortal who came from Thessaly and was welcomed into Latium by Camise. They got married, shared the kingdom and had many children together.

 

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