Space Agencies Go For Jupiter and Saturn

 

NASA and the European Space Agency have decided to go ahead with an ambitious plan to send a probe to Jupiter and its icy moon Europa. A further project would involve the two agencies to send a spacecraft to Saturn’s moon Titan.

David Southwood, ESA’s Director of Science says that the joint venture is a wonderful new challenge and it will be a milestone of 21 st century space exploration. The Jupiter mission has been chosen to start because it is the more realistic project.

Scientists have been dreaming of visiting Europa for a long time. The icy moon may have underground water and researchers want to find out if such a satellite may be fit for life. It is surely one of the places in the solar system where life might have evolved some time ago.

The project calls for NASA to send an orbiter to Europa and ESA to send one to Jupiter’s moon Ganymede. Both spacecraft would be launched in 2020, but from two separate launch sites. They would reach Jupiter by 2026 and examine the moons for the following three years. Although the two spacecraft would observe Europa from different positions only the NASA probe would spend time in Europa’s orbit.

The moon is said to have a strong radiation field and orbiting it would only be possible for a few months. NASA plans to use special equipment to protect its probe. The two probes would end their mission by crashing into the moons they are orbiting around.

British scientists and engineers will play key roles in the joint mission. A consortium is planning to prepare probes with instruments that would be dropped onto Europa’s surface. Thus, it could determine temperatures under the surface or locate magnetic and radiation fields.

 

Galileo Galilei

Galileo is often called the founder of modern science. He made many discoveries in astronomy and physics and he built telescopes to study space.

Galileo Galilei was born in Pisa, Italy in 1564. His father sent him to the university to study medicine, but young Galileo was more interested in science and mathematics.

Galileo made one of his greatest discoveries as he sat in a cathedral of Pisa. As he watched a chandelier swing back and forth he noticed that longer and shorter swings took the same time. This discovery became known as the law of the pendulum. These and other important discoveries made him so well-known that Galileo became a professor at the University of Pisa.

 Galileo often questioned scientific facts of his age. For a long time people thought that heavier objects fall to Earth faster than lighter ones. By dropping objects of the same size but different weights from the Leaning Tower of Pisa Galileo showed that this wasn’t true.

 In 1609 Galileo constructed his first telescope. He used it to observe the stars and the planets. He saw things that nobody had ever seen before. Galileo discovered that the moon’s surface was not smooth and flat, like everyone thought, but had a rough surface and was full of craters.

In January 1610 Galileo discovered 4 moons revolving around the Jupiter. They were named after him, the Galilean moons. These observations proved that not the Earth was the centre of the solar system, but the sun. It was a discovery that Copernicus had made 60 years earlier.

The Roman Catholic Church did not always like what Galileo taught. It still believed that the Earth was the centre of the universe and everything revolved around it. The church ordered him not to teach such ideas any more.

In 1633 Galileo was brought before the Inquisition, the Church’s court. It sentenced him to life in prison because of his teachings. Galileo was put under house arrest because he was old and not so healthy any more. He spent the last years of his life in Florence, where he continued to work on his theories and even published a final book. He became blind and died in 1642.

In 1992 Pope John Paul II published a document that said the Church made a mistake by condemning Galileo.

Albert Einstein

 Albert Einstein - Life and DiscoveriesAlbert Einstein - Life and Discoverie

Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein was a famous scientist who completely changed the way that people saw our world and the universe. Einstein created many theories which proved that things like gravity , light, energy and matter were connected with each other. At first, very few scientists could understand Einstein’s theories but as time passed other scientists showed that he was correct.

Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, Germany in 1879 and grew up in Munich. He wasn’t a good student at school and only did things he was interested in, like science and mathematics. At a very early age young Albert started wondering about the mysteries of the universe.

After school Einstein went to Switzerland and tried to become a teacher there, but he couldn’t find a job. He went to work at the Swiss patent office in Bern where he studied what other people had invented .

After divorce from his first wife, a classmate of his, Albert went to Berlin where he married his cousin Elsa. He lived in Berlin for a long time and there he developed many of his scientific theories. Einstein became so well known that he was invited to universities around the world to talk about his discoveries . In 1921 he received the Nobel Prize for Physics.

In the meantime things were starting to change in Germany. Einstein was against the Nazis and their ideas of controlling the world and killing Jews. The Nazis, in return, hated him and his theories and they burned most of his books.

Einstein decided to leave Germany and go to the United States. When World War II broke out in 1939 Einstein discovered that German scientists were working on a bomb that could kill thousands of people. He wrote a letter to the American president to warn him and suggested that the Americans start building one too.

In 1941 the American government started the Manhattan Project which led to the construction of the atomic bomb. Two of these bombs were dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end the war against Japan. Einstein was horrified when he heard the news. He wanted the world to use atomic energy for peaceful purposes .

For the last twenty years of his life, Einstein lived in Princeton where he continued his scientific work. He died on April 18, 1955

One of the most famous equations ever written came from Albert Einstein : E = mc 2 . Energy is mass times the squared speed of light. This equation shows that mass can be turned to energy. Because the speed of light square is such a high number even a small amount of mass can be turned into a lot of energy.

This means, for example, that there is enough energy in a glass of water to give power to a city like London for a whole week. The problem is how to get the energy out of the mass . This equation led to the building of the atomic bomb. The first bomb only had 0.6 grams of mass but scientist turned it into enough energy to destroy a whole city.

 Einstein also thought that space and time were closely related to each other. He thought that there were not three dimensions to objects but four—the fourth one was time. Other scientists, who continued his work, claimed that it is possible to travel into the past and into the future. Black holes might be tunnels that could take you back and forth in time .

According to Einstein all objects followed curved paths and get attracted by the gravity of an object. Time would pass more slowly if you are close to a very large object like a planet. This means that the clock of a plane goes faster than a clock at an airport because the plane is farther away from the earth.