SOURCE:::: http://www.glasbergen.com
Natarajan
Jan 18 2015
communication
Message For the Day….” True Love Should Remain Unaffected…”
Pure and unselfish love towards all living beings considering them as embodiments of the Divine, with no expectation of reward, is alone true love. Love must be free from dislikes, friendly, and compassionate towards all beings (Adweshtā sarvabhūtānām maitraḥ karuñaivacha)!Whatever be the vicissitudes one may face, whatever be the personal sorrows and privations one may undergo, true love should remain unaffected. Today, when any difficulty arises or when some trouble crops up, love turns into hatred. True love is the sweet fruit that grows out of the fragrant flower of good deeds. Love rules without recourse to the sword. It binds without laws. Like the lotus which blooms when the Sun rises, the heart of man blossoms when love enters it. Like the glow of the flame in a fire, like the rays of the Sun, Divine Love is the natural quality present in every human being.
Beagle 2 Spacecraft… Lost in 2003 … Found in Mars in 2015 !!!
Long-Lost Spacecraft Spotted on Mars
IT turns out the Beagle has landed after all — but it never called home.
The gone-but-not-forgotten spacecraft Beagle-2 went AWOL on Christmas Day, 2003, when it was supposed to land on Mars and start transmitting data back to Earth.
Instead, the British-built craft went dark. After several months, it was declared lost — presumed to have been destroyed during its approach or while trying to land on the red planet.
On Friday, more than 11 years later, European Space Agency officials reported that the Beagle-2 had been finally found — thanks to extensive detective work based on new photos taken by the high-resolution camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
DISCOVERY: Have scientists solved the Beagle 2 mystery?
The photos show the craft landed safely on Mars and partially deployed — but was unable to fully deploy and start communicating.
Still, it was a vindication of sorts for space scientists who had wondered for more than a decade about the fate of their pet project, which was designed to search for signs of life on Mars.
Rudolf Schmidt, ESA’s Mars Express project manager at the time, called the finding “excellent news.”
He said not knowing what happened to Beagle-2 had “remained a nagging worry.”
Soon after Beagle-2’s disappearance, NASA landed both Spirit and Opportunity near the Martian equator.
Both sent back troves of images and discoveries, providing the sort of information astronomers had been seeking when the first Mars probes began.
There it is … This NASA annotated image shows a bright feature interpreted as the Beagle 2 Lander with solar arrays at least partially deployed on the surface of Mars. Pic: AFP PHOTO/NASA Source: AFP
Mars is notoriously hard to reach. In a half-century of launch attempts, more than half of the missions by various countries have failed to get off the ground on Earth or overshot Mars.
Landing on the red planet is particularly treacherous because of the thin atmosphere.
Incoming spacecraft travelling at 19,300kph have only minutes to slow to a stop.
The Martian terrain is also full of obstacles — boulders, cracks and cliffs — and a wrong move can doom a spacecraft.
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has circled the planet since 2006, has periodically searched for spacecraft missing in action.
Still missing is NASA’s Mars Polar Lander, which lost contact during its arrival at the south pole in 1999.
Officials said careful analysis of the high-resolution photos showed the Beagle-2 had landed within its expected landing area in a basin close to the Martian equator. Signs of key entry and descent components were also spotted.
Identifying the craft was made more difficult by its small size — it is just over 1.8 metres wide with its solar panels unfurled.
Lost in space … A computer generated image of the Mars Express in orbit around Mars. Pic: AP Photo/European Space Agency Source: AP
The 143-pound Beagle-2 was named for the ship that carried naturalist Charles Darwin on his voyage of discovery in the 1830s.
It is shaped like an oversized pocket watch and was designed to descend through the Martian atmosphere, deploy parachutes, and “bounce” to a safe landing on inflatable bags.
Experts who helped identify the lander at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Lab said the photographs are “consistent” with only a partial deployment of the Beagle-2 upon landing.
They said a failure to fully deploy would explain why no data or signals from the craft were ever received, since a complete deployment of all of its solar panels would have been needed for successful transmissions.
Alfred McEwen, chief investigator of the project, said the special camera had been used to search for all of the landers that have tried to descend to the surface of Mars.
“This the first time we found one that didn’t send a signal after it landed,” he said.
The Beagle has landed … A computer-generated image showing the Beagle 2 Probe on surface of Mars. Pic: AP Photo/European Space Agency Source: AP
“If the landing sequence works correctly, the probe sends a radio signal, and you can use that to pinpoint where it is coming from, even if it broadcasts only very briefly. But in the case of Beagle-2, we didn’t get anything. All we had to go by was the target landing area.”
Experts who worked on the project said the Beagle-2 mission can now be classified a partial success — even if it never provided information about possible life on Mars.
UK Space Agency chief executive David Parker said the discovery of the craft showed its complex landing procedures had worked.
“This finding makes the case that Beagle-2 was more of a success than we previously knew and undoubtedly an important step in Europe’s continuing exploration of Mars,” he said.
The Beagle-2 was launched on ESA’s Mars Express orbiter. It was released from its mother ship on December 19, 2003, and was supposed to land six days later, but no communications with the lander were ever established.
Professor Mark Sims of the University of Leicester, who worked on the project, said the new information shows the team came extremely close to its goal of getting data from Mars, with the deployment failing only in its final stage.
“To be frank, I had all but given up hope of ever knowing what happened to Beagle-2,” he said, admitting he was troubled every Christmas Day by the unknown fate of the craft.
SOURCE:::: http://www.news.com.au
Natarajan
Jan 17 2015
Message For the Day…” We are all Actors in Puppet Show By the Creator , the Master Director, GOD…”
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We see the outer circumstances, the processes that result in the final event, and in our ignorance we judge that this set of causes produced these effects. We guess the nature of emotions and feelings from what we gauge from events. But circumstances, events, emotions, and feelings are all simply ‘instruments’ in His hands, serving His will and His purpose. When the moment comes, He uses them for His plan and brings about the outcome He has willed. He is the embodiment of time (Kala); He comes as the Master of Time. The force of Atmic faith is the bridge that spans the chasm, and for those who have developed that force and faith, floods are of no concern. With strong faith as their safe support, they can reach the other bank, braving all dangers. All this, is but a grand puppet show by the Creator, the Master Director!
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Image of the Day…. Interior View of International Space Station…!!!
This image of the interior view from the International Space Station’s Cupola module was taken on Jan. 4, 2015. The large bay windows allows the Expedition 42 crew to see outside. The Cupola houses one of the space station’s two robotic work stations used by astronauts to manipulate the large robotic arm seen through the right window. The robotic arm, or Canadarm2, was used throughout the construction of the station and is still used to grapple visiting cargo vehicles and assist astronauts during spacewalks. The Cupola is attached to the nadir side of the space station and also gives a full panoramic view of the Earth.
Image Credit: NASA
SOURCE::: http://www.nasa.gov
Natarajan
Jan 17 2015
Image of the Day…. “Trees are Poems ” !!!
Trees are poems
A lone tree on the stark slope of a granite dome in Yosemite National Park.
Trees are poems that the earth writes upon the sky.
~Khalil Gibran
Kurt Harvey captured this image in Yosemite National Park in California. He wrote:
I’ve admired this tree many times while driving along the Tioga Pass Road in Yosemite. Rooted in a crack on the slope of a granite dome it has a grand view and is also very exposed to the wind. It looks like its doing well though and is inspiring to see.
This was made from a 3 RAW bracketed capture. The sky was pretty featureless with thin overcast and smoke from the fire near Foresta but with some work I was able to bring out the texture you see.
SOURCE::::: http://www.earthskynews.org
Natarajan
Jan 17 2015
” Feather Touch Paintings…” Amazing !!!
Amazing Feather Paintings |
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| Many people have seen feathers as decorative items before. Today, ostrich, peacock and bird of paradise feathers can be seen in haute couture and in the costumes of indigenous peoples.
Alaskan-born and -bred artist Julie Thompson is an astounding exponent of this incredible art form. Known as feather art, this is the drawing or creation of images on feathers.
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Image of the Day….Titan… Saturn’s Moon !!!
Ten Years Ago, Huygens Probe Lands on Surface of TitanTen years ago, an explorer from Earth parachuted into the haze of an alien moon toward an uncertain fate. After a gentle descent lasting more than two hours, it landed with a thud on a frigid floodplain, surrounded by icy cobblestones. With this feat, the Huygens probe accomplished humanity’s first landing on a moon in the outer solar system. Huygens was safely on Titan, the largest moon of Saturn.
These images of Saturn’s moon Titan were taken on Jan. 14, 2005 by the Huygens probe at four different altitudes. The images are a flattened (Mercator) projection of the view from the descent imager/spectral radiometer on the probe as it landed on Titan’s surface.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington. JPL designed, developed and assembled the Cassini orbiter. NASA supplied two instruments on the Huygens probe, the Descent Imager/Spectral Radiometer and the Gas Chromatograph Mass Spectrometer.
> More: NASA and ESA Celebrate 10 Years Since Titan Landing
Image Credit: ESA/NASA/JPL/University of Arizona
SOURCE:::: http://www.nasa.gov
Natarajan
Jan 16 2015
Who Invented the Paper Clip … ?
The Invention of the Paperclip
The paperclip is today a ubiquitous item in offices and homes the world over. So who invented it?
One very popular false origin of the paperclip was that it was invented by Norwegian patent office manager, Johan Vaaler. He was even granted patents in Germany and the U.S. for a paperclip of similar design as the Gem style paperclip, which is the most commonly used paperclip today. However, Vaaler’s paperclip came after the Gem paperclip was already popular throughout Europe. His design was slightly different than the Gem paperclip in that it didn’t include the all too critical second loop that makes the Gem style much more functional. His paperclip had the papers inserted by lifting the outer wire slightly and pushing the papers into the clip such that the rest of the clip stood out from the paper at a 90 degree angle, which was necessary because of the lack of the critical second loop to allow the papers to be more or less embedded in the clip flatly.
This also made it so the papers wouldn’t be held together very well as they relied only on how bendable the wire used was to hold the papers. The Gem style paperclip, on the other hand, exploits the torsion principle to help bind papers together. Vaaler’s design was never manufactured or sold and his patents eventually expired.
Why Vaaler gets the credit in so many places, including in many encyclopedias and dictionaries after the 1950s, is largely thanks to a patent agency worker who was visiting Germany to register Norwegian patents in the 1920s. When he was doing so, he noticed Vaaler’s design for the paperclip and wrote an article stating Vaaler was the original creator of the paperclip.
This misinformation found its way into encyclopedias around the 1950s thanks to WWII. During WWII in Norway particularly, along with France and some other occupied countries, the paperclip became a symbol of unity for those rebelling against the Germans. It is not thought that the Norwegians did this because they thought a Norwegian had invented the paperclip, but rather because it simply signified being bound together and was useful as it wasn’t initially a banned symbol or item by the Germans and could be easily clipped to one’s clothing. Eventually, the Germans caught on and people were prohibited from wearing paperclips.
After the war, the fact that the Gem style paperclip had served as a symbol of unity resulted in interest in the origin of the paperclip, at which point the article written by the patent agency worker and the subsequent patent by Vaaler, who was now long dead, was discovered. It was overlooked, of course, that his design was different than the Gem style paperclip and apparently they didn’t bother checking that the Gem style paperclip had already been around by the time Vaaler patented his version of the paperclip. It made a good story though, particularly after the war and how the paperclip was used in Norway among other places, and so this false origin subsequently found its way into many encyclopedias.
The myth is so popular, in fact, that a Gem style, 23 foot tall paperclip was placed near a university in Oslo in 1989 to honor Vaaler, who in fact had nothing to do with the Gem style paperclip design. Further, a commemorative stamp was created honoring Vaaler that also depicted the Gem style paperclip, not Vaaler’s design.
Another false origin of the modern day paperclip often attributes it to Herbert Spencer, who was the man who came up with the term “survival of the fittest”. He claims in his autobiography that he invented a pin that bound papers together. This led to the false belief that he invented the paperclip. In fact, though, his drawing of his binding pin looked more like a cotter pin and, thus, held papers together more like Vaaler’s design. Unlike Vaaler’s design though, this cotter pin style clip wouldn’t stick out nearly as much and, thus, was a bit more functional.
So who really invented the paperclip as we know it today? It is thought to have first been made by the Gem Manufacturing Company in Britain around the 1870s and later introduced to the United States around the 1890s. This is also why the Swedish word for paperclip is “gem”. As for who within that company invented it, this isn’t known, as it was never patented nor did they realize at the time how historically significant that little invention would be, so nobody bothered to save the documentation of the invention.
SOURCE:::: http://www.today i foundout.com
Natarajan
Jan 16 2015
Joke of the Day… ” Senior Citizen… ” !!!
You know you’re a senior citizen when every time you leave your house; you have to go back because of something you forget.
SOURCE::: http://www.joke a day.com
Natarajan
Jan 16 2015
Take off with Natarajan 