My Science School

The Soviet Union stunned the world on Nov. 3, 1957, with the launch of Sputnik 2. On board the small satellite was a little dog, Laika, the first animal to orbit Earth. However, Laika was not the first animal in space. The United States and the U.S.S.R. had been putting animals atop rockets since 1947.

Laika was a young, mostly-Siberian husky. She was rescued from the streets of Moscow. Soviet scientists assumed that a stray dog would have already learned to endure harsh conditions of hunger and cold temperatures. Laika and two other dogs were trained for space travel by being kept in small cages and learning to eat a nutritious gel that would be their food in space.

The dog's name was originally Kudryavka, or Little Curly, but she became known internationally as Laika, a Russian word for several breeds of dog similar to a husky. American reporters dubbed her Muttnik as a pun on Sputnik.

Unfortunately, Laika's trip into space was one-way only. A re-entry strategy could not be worked out in time for the launch. It is unknown exactly how long Laika lived in orbit — perhaps a few hours or a few days — until the power to her life-support system gave out. Sputnik 2 burned up in the upper atmosphere in April 1958.

 

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The Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to three astrophysicists Tuesday for work that was literally out of the world, and indeed the universe. They are Roger Penrose, an Englishman, Reinhard Genzel, a German, and Andrea Ghez, an American. They were recognized for their work on the gateways to eternity known as black holes, massive objects that swallow light and everything else forever that falls in their unsparing maws.

Black holes were one of the first and most extreme predictions of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, first announced in November 1915. The theory explains the force we call gravity, as objects try to follow a straight line through a universe whose geometry is warped by matter and energy. As a result, planets as well as light beams follow curving paths, like balls going around a roulette wheel.

Einstein was taken aback a few months later when Karl Schwarzschild, a German astronomer, pointed out that the equations contained an apocalyptic prediction: In effect, cramming too much matter and energy inside too small a space would cause space-time to collapse into a point of infinite density called a singularity. In that place — if you could call it a place — neither Einstein’s equations nor any other physical law made sense.

Einstein could not fault the math, but he figured that in real life, nature would find a way to avoid such a calamity.

 

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It is intriguing that such a small planet can have such a complex collection of satellites. The discovery provides additional clues for unraveling how the Pluto system formed and evolved.

Pluto's entire moon system is believed to have formed by a collision between two the dwarf planet and another Kuiper Belt Object early in the history of the solar system. The smashup flung material that coalesced into the family of satellites observed around Pluto.

"The moons form a series of neatly nested orbits, a bit like Russian dolls," said Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute.

The known moons of Pluto are:

• Charon: Discovered in 1978, this small moon is almost half the size of Pluto. It is so big Pluto and Charon are sometimes referred to as a double planet system.


• Nix and Hydra: These small moons were found in 2005 by a Hubble Space Telescope team studying the Pluto system.


• Kerberos: Discovered in 2011, this tiny moon is located between the orbits of Nix and Hydra.


• Styx: Discovered in 2012, this little moon was found by a team of scientists searching for potential hazards to the New Horizons spacecraft Pluto flyby in July 2015.


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Remnants of an ancient water ocean are buried beneath the icy crust of dwarf planet Ceres — or, at least, lingering pockets of one. That’s the tantalizing find presented August 10 by scientists working on NASA’s Dawn mission. 

By far, Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt, which girdles the inner planets between Mars and Jupiter. But unlike its rockier neighbors, Ceres is a giant ice ball. It holds more water than any world in the inner solar except for Earth. That knowledge had long led some astronomers to suspect Ceres may have once had a subsurface ocean, which is part of the reason NASA sent the Dawn spacecraft there.

Ceres is the only dwarf planet in the inner solar system, and it locks up one-third of the entire mass in the asteroid belt. Astronomers think Ceres is a protoplanet, the fossilized remains of a world that never fully formed. But its growth was halted before it could become a full planet. Having such a history means Ceres likely holds an early record of our solar system's primordial past — hence the name Dawn.

 

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According to International Astronomical Union (IAU), which began meeting in August of 2006, the term Plutoid now applies to Pluto, as well as any other small stellar body that exist beyond the range of Neptune.

Pluto was to these stellar objects what Ceres was to large objects in the asteroid belt – that is to say, comparable in size. Astronomers proposed several names for these objects, but matters did not come to a head until Eris was discovered. This dwarf planet was actually larger than Pluto, 2500 km in diameter, making it twenty-seven percent larger than Pluto.

In the end, the IAU could only resolve this matter by removing Pluto from the list of planets and devising a new category for dwarf planets that could no longer be considered true planets. Plutoid was the result, and now applies to the trans-Neptunian objects of Pluto, Haumea, Makemake, and Eris.

 

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Jupiter is the fifth planet from our Sun and is, by far, the largest planet in the solar system – more than twice as massive as all the other planets combined. Jupiter's stripes and swirls are actually cold, windy clouds of ammonia and water, floating in an atmosphere of hydrogen and helium. Jupiter’s iconic Great Red Spot is a giant storm bigger than Earth that has raged for hundreds of years.

The composition of Jupiter is similar to that of the Sun—mostly hydrogen and helium. Deep in the atmosphere, pressure and temperature increase, compressing the hydrogen gas into a liquid. This gives Jupiter the largest ocean in the solar system—an ocean made of hydrogen instead of water. Scientists think that, at depths perhaps halfway to the planet's center, the pressure becomes so great that electrons are squeezed off the hydrogen atoms, making the liquid electrically conducting like metal. Jupiter's fast rotation is thought to drive electrical currents in this region, generating the planet's powerful magnetic field. It is still unclear if, deeper down, Jupiter has a central core of solid material or if it may be a thick, super-hot and dense soup. It could be up to 90,032 degrees Fahrenheit (50,000 degrees Celsius) down there, made mostly of iron and silicate minerals (similar to quartz).

 

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Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova born 6 March 1937) is a member of the Russian State Duma, engineer, and former cosmonaut. She is the first and youngest woman to have flown in space with a solo mission on the Vostok 6 on 16 June 1963. She orbited the Earth 48 times, spent almost three days in space, and to date remains the only woman to have been on a solo space mission.

Valentina Tereshkova was born on 6 March in 1937 in the Bolshoye Maslennikovo, a village on the Volga River 270 kilometres (170 mi) northeast of Moscow and part of the Yaroslavl Oblast in central Russia. Her parents had migrated from Belarus. Her father, Vladimir Tereshkov, was a former tractor driver and a sergeant in command of a tank in the Soviet Army. He died in the Finnish Winter War during World War II when Tereshkova was two years old. He and her mother Elena Fyodorovna Tereshkova had three children. After her father's death, her mother moved the family to Yaroslavl, seeking better employment opportunity, and became employed at the Krasny Perekop cotton mill.

After Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space in 1961, Tereshkova volunteered for the Soviet space program. Although she did not have any experience as a pilot, she was accepted into the program because of her 126 parachute jumps. At the time, cosmonauts had to parachute from their capsules seconds before they hit the ground on returning to Earth.

Along with four other women, Tereshkova received 18 months of training, which included tests to determine how she would react to long periods of time being alone, to extreme gravity conditions and to zero-gravity conditions. Of the five women, only Tereshkova went into space.

Tereshkova was chosen to pilot Vostok 6. It was to be a dual mission. Cosmonaut Valeriy Bykovsky launched on Vostok 5 on June 14, 1963.

 

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An American commercial cargo spacecraft bound for the International Space Station has been named after fallen NASA astronaut Kalpana Chawla, the first India-born woman to enter space, for her key contributions to human spaceflight. Northrop Grumman, an American global aerospace and defence technology company, announced that its next Cygnus capsule will be named the "S.S. Kalpana Chawla", in memory of the mission specialist who died with her six crewmates aboard the space shuttle Columbia in 2003.

In 2000, Chawla was selected for her second voyage into space, serving again as a mission specialist on STS-107. The mission was delayed several times, and finally launched in 2003. Over the course of the 16-day flight, the crew completed more than 80 experiments.

On the morning of Feb. 1, 2003, the space shuttle returned to Earth, intending to land at Kennedy Space Center. At launch, a briefcase-sized piece of insulation had broken off and damaged the thermal protection system of the shuttle's wing, the shield that protects it from heat during re-entry. As the shuttle passed through the atmosphere, hot gas streaming into the wing caused it to break up. The unstable craft rolled and bucked, pitching the astronauts about. Less than a minute passed before the ship depressurized, killing the crew. The shuttle broke up over Texas and Louisiana before plunging into the ground. The accident was the second major disaster for the space shuttle program, following the 1986 explosion of the shuttle Challenger.

 

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Apollo was the NASA program that resulted in American astronauts' making a total of 11 spaceflights and walking on the moon.

The first four flights tested the equipment used in the Apollo Program. Six of the other seven flights landed on the moon. The first Apollo flight happened in 1968. The first moon landing took place in 1969. The last moon landing was in 1972.

A total of 12 astronauts walked on the moon. The astronauts conducted scientific research there. They studied the lunar surface. They collected moon rocks to bring back to Earth.

NASA designed the Apollo Command Module for this program. It was a capsule with room for three astronauts. The astronauts rode in the Command Module on the way to the moon and back. It was larger than the spacecraft used in the Mercury and Gemini programs. The astronauts had room to move around inside the spacecraft. The crew area had about as much room as a car.

Another spacecraft, the Lunar Module, was used for landing on the moon. This spacecraft carried astronauts from orbit around the moon to the moon's surface, then back into orbit. It could carry two astronauts.

Two types of rockets were used for the Apollo program. The first flights used the smaller Saturn I (1) B rocket. It was about as tall as a 22-story building. This rocket had two stages. That means it was made of two parts. When the first part ran out of fuel, it dropped away from the other and burned up in Earth's atmosphere. The second part continued flying. The Saturn IB rocket was used to test the new Apollo capsule in Earth orbit.

The other flights used the more powerful Saturn V (5) rocket. This three-stage rocket sent the Apollo spacecraft to the moon. It was about as tall as a 36-story building.

 

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Hayabusa was a Japanese spacecraft that brought back a sample of asteroid material to Earth in 2010, after a mission riddled with technical glitches. The spacecraft touched down on a small near-Earth asteroid called 25143 Itokawa and safely brought back minute rocky particles for analysis.

The success of the mission inspired a successor spacecraft, called Hayabusa 2. This spacecraft is on its way to asteroid 162173 Ryugu and is expected to arrive in July 2018. Asteroid samples will be returned to Earth in December 2020.

In November 2010, JAXA said it had collected 1,500 grains that "were identified as rocky particles"; most of them were thought to come from "extraterrestrial origin" (meaning, the asteroid). JAXA had known beforehand that the particles of material were there, but it took several months of analysis to confirm they were not contamination from Earth or from Hayabusa's voyage.

In the initial results, JAXA announced it found minerals such as olivine and pyroxene, which are common on Earth and have been found on the moon and Mars. The particles were tiny, just one-tenth the width of a human hair (10 micrometers in size). Several articles on Hayabusa's dust collection appeared in the Aug. 26, 2011, issue of Science; among the findings was confirmation that the dust on 25143 Itokawa was identical to material on an LL chondrite type of meteorite. This finding confirmed showed link between meteorites and asteroids.

 

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Peggy Annette Whitson (born February 9, 1960) is an American biochemistry researcher, retired NASA astronaut, and former NASA Chief Astronaut. Her first space mission was in 2002, with an extended stay aboard the International Space Station as a member of Expedition 5. Her second mission launched October 10, 2007, as the first female commander of the ISS with Expedition 16. She was on her third long-duration space flight and was the commander of the International Space Station for Expedition 51, before handing over command to Fyodor Yurchikhin on June 1, 2017.

The flight of Space Shuttle mission STS-120, commanded by astronaut Pam Melroy, was the first time that two female mission commanders have been in orbit at the same time. After completion of her eighth EVA in March 2017, Whitson now holds the records for the oldest woman spacewalker, and the record for total spacewalks by a woman, which was broken by her again after a ninth and tenth EVA in May 2017, surpassing Sunita Williams, who has completed 7.

Following her fellowship at Rice, she began working at Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, as a National Research Council Resident Research Associate. From April 1988 until September 1989, Whitson served as the Supervisor for the Biochemistry Research Group at KRUG International, a medical sciences contractor at NASA-JSC.

From 1991 through 1997, Whitson was invited to be an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Internal Medicine and the Department of Human Biological Chemistry and Genetics at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, Texas. In 1997, Whitson began a position as adjunct assistant professor at Rice University in the Maybee Laboratory for Biochemical and Genetic Engineering.

From 1992 to 1995, she served as project scientist for the Shuttle-Mir Program and, until her selection as an astronaut candidate in 1996, as deputy division chief for the Medical Sciences division at the Johnson Space Center.

 

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A stone wall is hard, water is wet, and the air is invisible. But they are all matter, and they are all made up of molecules. Even so, they behave in different ways. So we say that they are different forms of matter.

Stone is a solid. It has a shape of its own. The molecules in most solids are very close together. They pull hard on each other. This pull makes solids keep their shape.

Water is a liquid. It has no shape of its own. It takes the shape of the container it is in. Molecules in most liquids are further apart than molecules in a solid. They don’t pull as hard on one another. So the molecules of a liquid can slide around and take any shape.

Air is a gas. It has no shape of its own, either. Its molecules are so far apart that they hardly pull on one another at all. Molecules of a gas bounce around so easily that they can squeeze into a small balloon or spread out to fill a big room.

Most kinds of matter are compounds – they are formed when elements join together. Just as the tiniest bit of an element is called an atom, the tiniest bit of a compound is called a molecule. A molecule is a group of joined atoms.

Molecules can be very simple. When you breathe air, your body takes in molecules of a gas called oxygen. Each oxygen molecule is made up of two oxygen atoms joined together.

But some molecules have many kinds of atoms. The “vinegary” taste of vinegar comes from a molecule containing two carbon atoms, four hydrogen atoms, and two oxygen atoms. And some molecules are made of thousands of atoms. Bread and potatoes contain giant molecules that look like chains - the chains have thousands of molecules.

Atoms and molecules follow the rules of chemistry and physics, even when they’re part of a complex, living, breathing being. If you learned in chemistry that some atoms tend to gain or lose electrons or form bonds with each other, those facts remain true even when the atoms or molecules are part of a living thing. In fact, simple interactions between atoms—played out many times and in many different combinations, in a single cell or a larger organism—are what make life possible. One could argue that everything you are, including your consciousness, is the byproduct of chemical and electrical interactions between a very, very large numbers of nonliving atoms!

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It was the 1890’s, and a young Polish-born scientist named Marie Sklodowska Curie hurried home through the streets of Paris. But her thoughts were back in the unheated, leaky shed where she worked. She was puzzling over an experiment she had done over and over. The result had been the same each time, but she could not explain why!

In this experiment, Marie used a rock called pitchblende that gave off mysterious rays of energy. These rays were like a signal, but the signals made no sense at all.

Marie believed that the signals from the rock might be coming from an element that no one knew about. So she began trying to find it. She boiled the pitchblende in huge pots. Next she added chemicals to it to break up the different compounds. Then she tested each part to see if it gave off rays. Her work took a long time and many of her experiments went wrong.

Finally, in 1898, Marie found the element that gave off the energy. She named it radium. The radium gave off so much energy that it glowed in the dark! It took Marie four years and several thousand kilograms of pitchblende to get just a tiny pinch of pure radium.

Marie’s work was hard, but it paid off. In 1903, she won a Nobel Prize, the most important award in science - and she gave the world a new element.

So many that if you started to count them, you probably would never finish.

But if you could sort out the atoms in all that matter, you would find that there are only about 100 kinds. Each of those 100 kinds of atoms is a different size.

Some kinds of matter are made up of only one kind of atom. These kinds of matter are called elements.

Gold is an element. A piece of pure gold is made of just gold atoms. Iron is an element, too. It is made of just iron atoms.

But most kinds of matter are made of two or more different kinds of atoms joined together. These kinds of matter are called compounds.

Water is a compound made of two elements, an element called oxygen and an element called hydrogen. By themselves, oxygen and hydrogen are invisible gases. You cannot see them. But when they join together, they make a liquid you can see and feel – water.