PLANET OF THE WEEK : uranus

Hanging like a giant cue ball in space, Uranus has hidden its secrets in frozen gases. The icy planet Uranus is a smaller version of Jupiter and not the small rocky bodies like Earth. It have faint rings and a number of moons. Uranus takes some 84 years to orbit the sun. It rotates on its side and so half the time one pole is toward the sun and then the other making each of the four seasons last about 20 years. The faint bluish color of the planet is because the methane gas in the atmosphere absorbs red light and reflects blue light.
On March 13, 1781, an English astronomer named William Herschel discovered the planet but thought it might have been a comet. More observations and calculations by Herschel and others confirmed that it was indeed a planet. Since it was the first new planet found, Herschel had the honor of naming it, so, Herschel's Planet became Georgium Sidus (George's Star) after King George III of England.
Knighted for his many astronomical contributions, Sir William Herschel was born Friedrich Wilhelm Herschel in Hanover, Germany on November 15, 1738. Due to poor health he moved to England in his teens where he changed his name to William. He was an accomplished musician as well as an astronomer. His sister, Caroline, faithfully helped record his nightly observations. See more about Women in Astronomy here.
After the astronomer's death the planet was changed to Uranus as suggested by German astronomer Johann Bode. He thought that since Saturn was Jupiter's father then the next outward planet should be called Saturn's father, Uranus. Uranus is the only planet called by a Greek name rather than a Roman name, however, most of the moons of the various planets are named from Greek mythology. See below for Planet Myths and Lore.
New Moon for UranusObservations of Uranus taken in Chile in August, 2002, with the 4-meter Cerro Tololo Interamerican Observatory Blanco telescope have revealed a probable new moon for Uranus. The object is likely 7 to 19 kilometers across and would be the 16th moon orbiting Uranus. Five moons were known before the Voyager 2 Mission which found 10 more totaling 15. All of the planets' natural satellites seem to be about 50% water ice, 30% rock, and 20% carbon and nitrogen materials.

When the legend announced his Deafness

BETHOVEN'S DEAFNESS

One of the most surprising facts about Ludwig van Beethoven is that he was deaf. How can a musician, a composer, lack what we would imagine to be his most important sense?
The first people he confided in were those who were gorgraphically far from him, but in whom he had absolute confidence: those who lived at Bonn.
When he could no longer hide his handicap, Beethoven used notebooks in which visitors could write what they wanted him to know, or equally ask what they wanted to know. Because of this, we lack, of course, the most important part to understanding better his personality.

Beyond the fact that Beethoven's deafness was exaggerated and dramatized, it is important to note that it was not complete deafness from the start. To be true, it was an infirmity that established itself slowly, and also developed itself quite erratically. What was really dramatic indeed, was the moment in which the young and successful composer and virtuoso had to accept that he was suffering from a chronic, incurable illness with which he will have to live. And that was going to get worse.
Later no, when he could not hide his deafness anymore, he accepted it. It was in the midst of his heroic period and it was documented by himself, in a quote written in the margins of the Razoumovsky Quartets.
We could safely state that even to the end of his life, there were days in which he could hear a bit. Many many others in which he was stone deaf. Then finally when the communication difficulties became really great, --more or less around 1818-- Beethoven got to use leafs of paper, or tablets, where his friends and visitors could write what they wanted to tell him, or ask him. These are known now as the "Conversation Books". Naturally we lack the answers the Master provided to the questions written there. except for a few cases, all we can do is guess what he might have said.

This blog provides a more detailed learning about Bethoven's biography. To accses, click here.

PLANET OF THE WEEK : saturn

Saturn is the next biggest planet in the solar system. Saturn and some of its moons can be seen in the composite image at left. Four more moons were found in late 2000 and 9 more were discovered recently for a total of 31. Scientists are tracking more objects that may be additional moons.
The Voyager missions found winds, magnetic field, auroras and lightning on the planet similar to Jupiter. Also, the planet has light colored cloud bands (zones) and darker bands (belts) like the larger gas giant.
The facinating ring system observed by Galileo in 1610 is only begining to be understood. At first thought to be a solid ring it is now known to be thousands of water ice particles with some chunks as big as a small car. The rings are held in place by moons that "shephard" the particles and keep them in a series of ringlets. Some gaps like the Casinni Division separate the ringlets called the "A Ring", "B Ring" and so on. The Cassini/Huygens spacecraft will pass through between the "F" and "G" rings on its way to orbit Saturn.

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PLANET OF THE WEEK : jupiter

Jupiter takes about 12 years to orbit the sun and rotates in about 10 hours. This short Jupiter "day" is amazing since the planet is roughly 11 Earth diameters wide.
Unlike the rocky planets, Jupiter is a ball of dense hydrogen, helium, water, nitrogen and other gases over a tiny rocky core. Powerful winds dominate the atmosphere with criss-crossing jet streams, lightning and huge hurricane-like storms like the Great Red Spot. This storm has been raging for over 300 years and is about 2 Earth diameters wide. The Great Red Spot can be seen on Jupiter along with four moons: Io (smallest), Europa, Callisto and Ganymede in this NASA image.
The planet had 39 known moons at the time of this image and a slight ring of smoke-sized particles and dust. The planet contains 71% of the planetary matter in the solar system and so its huge gravity pulls every object toward it. In fact, most of its moons were captured rather than forming with Jupiter. Scientists watched in awe as comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 broke up and smashed into Jupiter making explosions the size of the Earth.
New Moons for JupiterScientists keep finding more moons orbiting Jupiter. In May of 2002 Scott S. Sheppard and David C. Jewitt of the University of Hawaii announced the discovery of 11 new moons around the planet. As of March, 2003, Jupiter had 52 confirmed satellites. These newest moons are all no more than 2 to 4 kilometers across (if their surfaces are very dark), they all have retrograde (backward) orbits, and take somewhere between 557 and 773 days to orbit. These latest moonlets were announced by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) on Circular number 8089. In April, 2003, 8 more moons were confirmed for a total of 60 moons with the possibility of more as the search continues.
The box below shows how the four main satellites or moons (Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto) of Jupiter would look in realtime (right now). If you have binoculars or a telescope you can see the moons as tiny points of light. If you look the next night you can see for youself that they move.

COMING SOON

Coming soon to CYBERTRON ASTRO NOTES

If you want to test your logic skills and have fun, then this is the right place! You can tackle some of my favorite brain teasers. The puzzles are sorted by category including optical illusions, lawyer jokes and beyond.

WHAT CAN YOU BENEFIT IN ASTEROIDS ???

There are two options for processing an asteroid:
bring back raw asteroidal material, or
process it on-site to bring back only processed materials, and produce fuel propellant for the return trip.
It appears most likely we will choose option 2 because the equipment required to process asteroidal material is simple. The question is: How much we will process the material? Do we want to return only metal granules and ices? At what purity?
The next few sections cover only processing of asteroidal material. Transport of the asteroidal materials was covered in the web section on transportation, but it's notable that fuel propellants would be one product of asteroidal materials. If chemical rocketry is chosen then hydrogen and oxygen will likely be produced from water when needed. Likewise for alternative propulsion methods, e.g., instead of using chemical rocketry, use steam rockets which consume only water without any further processing.