My Science School

Launched on April 17, 1967, Surveyor 3 was the third engineering flight of the Surveyor series and the second in the series to achieve a soft landing on the moon. It was based on Surveyor 3's surface sampling tests that it was concluded that the lunar surface could hold the weight of an Apollo lunar module

The Apollo 11 mission will remain in the collective consciousness of human beings forever. This is because it was the first time we humans managed to set foot on our natural satellite, the moon.

It is important to remember that this was made possible due to a number of missions that preceded this one. Among these was the Surveyor 3 spacecraft which proved beyond doubt that an Apollo lunar module could indeed safely land on the moon's surface.

The third engineering flight of the Surveyor series, this spacecraft was the first to carry a surface-sampling instrument that could reach up to 1.5 m from the lander and dig up to 18 cm. Unlike its predecessors, Surveyor 3 began its mission from a parking orbit around Earth on April 17, 1967.

Bouncing to a stop

While it became the second in the series after Surveyor 1 to achieve a soft landing on the moon three days later on April 20, it was far from smooth. As highly reflective rocks confused the landers descent radar, the main engine did not cut off at the correct moment during the descent to the lunar surface.

This meant that Surveyor 3 bounced off the moon, not once but twice-first to a height of 10 m and then again to a height of 3 m. It was third time lucky for Surveyor 3 as it landed softly in the southeastern region of Oceanus  Procellarum.

With its worst behind it. Surveyor 3 set out to do what it was sent to do. Within an hour after landing, the spacecraft began transmitting the first of over 6,000 TV pictures of the surrounding areas.

Similar to wet sand

The most important phase of the mission included deployment of the surface sampler for digging trenches, manipulating lunar material, and making bearing tests. Based on commands from Earth, the probe was able to dig four trenches, performing four bearing tests and 13 impact tests.

The results from these experiments were the most important aspect of this mission. The scientists were able to conclude that lunar soil's consistency was similar to that of wet sand and that it would be solid enough to bear an Apollo lunar module when it landed.

The start of May saw the first lunar nightfall following the arrival of Surveyor 3. The spacecraft's solar panels stopped producing electricity and its last contact with Earth was on May 4. While Surveyor 1 could be reactivated twice after lunar nights, Surveyor 3 could not be reactivated when it was attempted 336 hours later during the next lunar dawn.

Tryst with Apollo 12

 That, however, wasn't the last of what we heard about Surveyor 3. Four months after the huge success of Apollo 11, NASA launched Apollo 12 in November 1969. The lunar module of Apollo 12 showcased pinpoint landing capacity as the precise lunar touchdown allowed the astronauts to land within walking distance of the Surveyor 3 spacecraft. During their second extra vehicular activity on November 19, astronauts Charles Conrad, Jr. and Alan L. Bean walked over to the inactive Surveyor 3 lander and recovered parts, including the camera system and the soil scoop.

Just like moon rocks, these were returned to Earth for studying, as they offered scientists a unique chance to analyse equipment that had been subjected to long-term exposure on the moon's surface. The studies of the parts showed that while Surveyor 3 had changed colour due to lunar dust adhesion and exposure to the sun, the TV camera and other hardware showed no signs of failure.

While NASA placed some of the Surveyor 3 parts into storage along with moon rocks and soil samples, the remaining parts found home elsewhere. Even though NASA treats them as lunar samples and not artefacts, they are greatly valued when gifted or loaned out, both to museums and individuals.

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Nike co-founder Bill Bowerman, a track and field coach, decided to make a running shoe that was lighter and had a stronger grip on various surfaces. Nike's first pair of running shoes was inspired by waffles.Bill Bowerman was having breakfast with his wife one morning in 1971 when it dawned on him that the grooves in the waffle iron she was using would be an excellent mold for a running shoe. Nike's first shoe, created in 1972, had a sole made using a waffle iron. The company's founder, Bill Bowerman used his wife's waffle iron to make grooves on the sole to provide a better grip while running.

Bowerman was the mad scientist of the group, experimenting with new shoe designs and rubber formulations to produce a better running shoe. In one landmark experiment, he squeezed rubber in his wife's waffle iron, producing the waffle sole. Nike made 12 of the shoes for runners in the 1972 Olympic trials, and the design went on to help Nike become a global sneaker powerhouse.

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The first espresso coffee was drunk in space by Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti in May 2015. The Italian Space Agency worked with Italian coffee manufacturer, Lavazza, to get the first coffee machine, called  ISSpresso, flown into the International Space Station.

In 2014, Argotec and Lavazza partnered to determine the feasibility of the project. Argotec then approached ASI, with Lavazza as a partner, and ASI agreed to sponsor the ISSpresso as an ASI payload on the ISS. NASA approval was then obtained.During the same year a feasibility study with the creation of some subsystems was conducted in order to validate the technological choices. On 14 April 2015, the flight model of ISSpresso was sent with SpaceX CRS-6 to the International Space Station and on 3 May 2015, Samantha Cristoforetti drank the first espresso in micro-gravity conditions. On 30 September 2017, Paolo Nespoli used the espresso machine on board the ISS to celebrate International Coffee Day.

The machine has conditions of use that are similar to the traditional ones, in order to facilitate the operations of the astronauts without requiring specific training. After verifying that the water container is installed properly, the astronaut inserts the coffee capsule into an opening on the top surface of the machine, then they close the small door and select the drink size. After that, they attach the drink pouch to the adapter and start the process of making coffee. The interfaces of the water container as well as of the drink pouch are the same used with the potable water dispenser installed on the space station, in order to facilitate the use of the system by the astronaut. The ISSpresso's "Coffee in Space" mission came to an end on 14 December 2017.

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The first photograph of our sun was taken by French Physicists Louis Fizeau and Leon Foucault on April 2nd, 1845. The snapshot was captured using the daguerreotype process (don't tell Bayard) and resulted after 1/60 of a second. If you observe the photograph carefully, you can spot several sunspots. That vintage photo of the Sun shows our star’s relatively sharp edge as well as a handful of sunspots. The spots are pretty big, roughly as wide as Jupiter (for comparison, the Sun is 1.4 million kilometers across).

If we want to click a picture of the sun, we pick up a camera or a smartphone and snap it in all its magnificence. While it is as easy as that currently, capturing the sun was no easy feat even a couple of centuries ago.

In fact it was only on April 2, 1845 that the first surviving detailed photographs of the surface of the sun were taken. French physicists Armand-Hippolyte-Louis Fizeau and Jean-Bernard-Leon Foucault were the two men who made it happen. Fizeau and Foucault came together through their interest in the Daguerre photographic process that had been recently invented. Even though photography was still in its infancy and its mainstream use in astronomy was still decades away, Fizeau and Foucault decided to turn their camera towards the sun.

While they came together for this project late in the 1830s, adapting the then existing photographic process to astronomy was no easy feat. It took them years, but on April 2, 1845, they succeeded in what they set out to do - capturing the sun in considerable detail. These images are the first surviving detailed daguerreotype photographs of the surface of the sun.

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Subramanyan Chandrasekhar was an Indian-born American astrophysicist who contributed to our understanding of massive stars. He shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1983, with William A. Fowler Born in Lahore, into a Tamil family, Chandrasekhar grew up in Madras (today's Chennai). Chandrasekhar studied physics at Presidency College, Madras, and went on to pursue graduate studies at the University of Cambridge, in England, in 1930. Here, he worked under R.H. Fowler on an improved model for the limiting mass of the degenerate star.

Chandrasekhar came up with a concept, later called the 'Chandrasekhar Limit Chandrasekhar improved upon the accuracy of the calculation in 1930 by calculating the limit for a polytrope model of a star in hydrostatic equilibrium, and comparing his limit to the earlier limit found by E. C. Stoner for a uniform density star. He showed that there is a maximum mass that a white dwarf star could reach and beyond which it would collapse or form black hole. The value of this limit was derived as 1.44 times that of solar mass. He published a series of papers related to this between 1931 and 1935. Chandrasekhar Limit was initially ignored, sometimes ridiculed, by the community of scientists because it supported the existence of back holes. But they were considered impossible at that time. It took years before the idea was accepted.

In 1937, Chandrasekhar was recruited to the University of Chicago faculty, a position he remained at until his death. He and his wife became American citizens in 1953.

Varied interest

Chandrasekhar is considered to be one of the first scientists who combined the disciplines of physics and astronomy. In fact, he was known for mastering several fields. Chandrasekhar studied stellar structure, hydrodynamics, radiative transfer, mathematical theory of black holes and colliding gravitational waves.

For 19 years, he served as editor of the Astrophysical Joumal and turned it into a world-class publication.

Chandrasekhar was instrumental in establishing the Ramanujan Institute of Mathematics in Madras in 1940s. He had strong association with many scientific institutions and young scientists back in India. Chandrasekhar died in 1995.

Legacy

Chandrasekhar was fittingly honoured by NASA when it ran a naming contest for one of the Observatories that it was planning to name after Chandrasekhar. The Chandra X-ray Observatory was launched and deployed by Space Shuttle Columbia in 1999.

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The U.S. space agency NASA will set its Moon mission rolling in April. The Artemis Mission is intended to land humans on the lunar surface once again. NASA's Apollo 11 mission landed the first humans on the moon on July 20, 1969. Almost five decades later, the American space agency will land the first woman and first person of colour on the Moon with its Artemis Mission in 2025. The mission has a long way to go before it sees the light of day. A series of tests will be carried out before the actual crewed mission. The first stage-Artemis I - will be the first integrated flight test of NASA's Deep Space Exploration Systems: the Orion spacecraft, Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, with the newly upgraded Exploration Ground Systems at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. In preparation, NASA conducted a dry run on March 17, when the mega rocket was rolled out to the launchpad. fuelled and run through a launch countdown, stopping just 10 seconds before lift-off. What are the other stages before the final countdown and what does NASA intend to study through the Artemis Mission? Let's find out in this Five Ws & One H...

 

WHAT is the Artemis Mission all about?

The Artemis Mission will explore the Moon's south pole, where ice has been confirmed to exist within craters, and where no human has ever been before. The objectives are to demonstrate new technologies needed for future exploration including Mars; to study the Moon to learn more about the origin and history of the Earth, the loon, and the Solar System; to find and use water and other critical resources needed for long-term exploration; and to learn how to live and operate on the surface of another celestial body.

WHAT are Artemis I and II?

Prior to the lunar surface landing, NASA will fly two missions around the Moon-Artemis I, an uncrewed flight to test the SLS and Orion spacecraft together, followed by the Artemis II mission, the first SLS and Orion flight test with crew. Artemis I, which is expected to launch in April first week, will travel over 450,616 km from Earth on a four to six-week mission. It will be the furthest that a spacecraft built for humans has ever gone. After the spacecraft completes its loop around the Moon, Orion will attempt to land safely off the coast of Baja California, Mexico.

Artemis II, scheduled to launch in 2024, is a 10-day mission that will carry four astronauts roughly 370,000 km from Earth where they will orbit the Moon. They will travel 6,700 km beyond the far side of the moon, becoming the first humans to travel that far in space.

The actual mission will see the first human to land on the Moon since Apollo 17 in 1972.

HOW will the mission pan out?

The basic outline for the Moon landing is- astronauts would take off aboard the Orion spacecraft, on the rocket - the Space Launch System - and fly to a lunar space station called the Gateway. Then, they would board a lunar descent craft built by SpaceX, go down to the Moon, conduct research on its surface, and return to the Gateway before the journey back home.

WHO are part of the crew?

In January 2020, NASA's 22nd astronaut group. nicknamed the Turtles", graduated and were assigned to the Artemis program. Some of the astronauts will fly on the Artemis missions to the Moon and may be part of the first crew to fly to Mars. Raja Chari, an Indian-American graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy, MIT. and U.S. Naval Test Pilot School, has made it to the list.

WHAT is Gateway?

The Gateway is a space station, similar to the Interational Space Station (ISS). But instead of orbiting the Earth, it will orbit the Moon and serve as a launch platform for missions to the lunar surface. Its development is led by the ISS partners. The Gateway will be occupied by astronauts continuously. establishing a permanent human presence near the Moon. The plan is to assemble the station piece by piece in prefabricated modules. just like how the ISS was built.

WHAT is special about the SLS rocket?

In the last 20 years, astronauts have been making routine trips to and from the ISS. But the Moon is nearly 1,000 times farther than where the ISS flies: getting astronauts there requires a much bigger rocket. The SLS rocket is the most powerful rocket built since the 1960s. It can produce 15% more thrust than the Saturn V that took the Apollo astronauts to the Moon. It is 98 metres tall and is capable of lofting about 24 metric tonnes to the Moon. With the SLS, NASA intends to send missions to Mars and eventually distant destinations.’

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J.BS Haldane, British scientist known for his work in physiology, genetics, evolutionary biology and mathematics. J.B.S. Haldane, in full John Burdon Sanderson Haldane, (born Nov. 5, 1892, Oxford, Oxfordshire, Eng.—died Dec. 1, 1964, Bhubaneswar, India), British geneticist, biometrician, physiologist, and popularizer of science who opened new paths of research in population genetics and evolution.

Son of the noted physiologist John Scott Haldane, he began studying science as assistant to his father at the age of eight and later received formal education in the classics at Eton College and at New College, Oxford (M.A., 1914). After World War I he served as a fellow of New College and then taught at the University of Cambridge (1922–32), the University of California, Berkeley (1932), and the University of London (1933–57). Haldane’s major works include Daedalus (1924), Animal Biology (with British evolutionist Julian Huxley, 1927), The Inequality of Man (1932), The Causes of Evolution (1932), The Marxist Philosophy and the Sciences (1938), Science Advances (1947), and The Biochemistry of Genetics (1954). Selected Genetic Papers of J.B.S. Haldane, ed. by Krishna R. Dronamraju, was published in 1990.

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Ludwig Boltzmann, in full Ludwig Eduard Boltzmann, (born February 20, 1844, Vienna, Austria—died September 5, 1906, Duino, Italy), physicist whose greatest achievement was in the development of statistical mechanics, which explains and predicts how the properties of atoms (such as mass, charge, and structure) determine. Boltzmann's general law asserts that a system will approach a state of thermodynamic equilibrium because that is the most probable state. He introduced the 'Boltzmann equation' (1877) relating the kinetic energy of a gas atom or molecule to temperature.

In the 1870s Boltzmann published a series of papers in which he showed that the second law of thermodynamics, which concerns energy exchange, could be explained by applying the laws of mechanics and the theory of probability to the motions of the atoms. In so doing, he made clear that the second law is essentially statistical and that a system approaches a state of thermodynamic equilibrium (uniform energy distribution throughout) because equilibrium is overwhelmingly the most probable state of a material system. During these investigations Boltzmann worked out the general law for the distribution of energy among the various parts of a system at a specific temperature and derived the theorem of equipartition of energy (Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution law). This law states that the average amount of energy involved in each different direction of motion of an atom is the same. He derived an equation for the change of the distribution of energy among atoms due to atomic collisions and laid the foundations of statistical mechanics.

Boltzmann was also one of the first continental scientists to recognize the importance of the electromagnetic theory proposed by James Clerk Maxwell of England. Though his work on statistical mechanics was strongly attacked and long-misunderstood, his conclusions were finally supported by the discoveries in atomic physics that began shortly before 1900 and by recognition that fluctuation phenomena, such as Brownian motion (random movement of microscopic particles suspended in a fluid), could be explained only by statistical mechanics.

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Prof. Deepak Dhar is the first Indian to receive this top honour in the field of statistical physics. Deepak Dhar, physicist, from the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Pune, has been selected for the Boltzmann medal, awarded by the Commission on Statistical Physics (C3) of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics. He becomes the first Indian to win this award, which was initiated in 1975, with Nobel laureate (1982) K.G. Wilson being the first recipient. Prof. Deepak Dhar Born on 30 October 1951 at Pratapgarh, in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh to Murli Dhar-Rama Gupta couple, Deepak Dhar graduated in science from the University of Allahabad in 1970 before earning a master's degree in physics from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur in 1972. He shares the platform with American scientist John J. Hopfield who is known for his invention of an associative neural network, now named after him. The award consists of the gilded Boltzmann medal with the inscription of Ludwig Boltzmann, and the chosen two scientists will be presented the medals at the StatPhys28 conference to be held in Tokyo, 7-11 August, 2023. Dhar was elected as a fellow by the Indian Academy of Sciences in 1990 where he is a sitting council member.  He became an elected fellow of the Indian National Science Academy on 1995 and the National Academy of Sciences, India elected him as a fellow in 1999. Dhar received the elected fellowship of the World Academy of Sciences in 2006 and was selected for the J. C. Bose National fellowship of the Science and Engineering Research Board in 2007, with the tenure running until 2017.

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