First 360-Degree Panorama From NASA's Curiosity Mars Rover

First 360-Degree Panorama From NASA's Curiosity Mars Rover

PASADENA, Calif. -- Remarkable image sets from NASA's Curiosity rover and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter are continuing to develop the story of Curiosity's landing and first days on Mars.
The images from Curiosity's just-activated navigation cameras, or Navcams, include the rover's first self-portrait, looking down at its deck from above. Another Navcam image set, in lower-resolution thumbnails, is the first 360-degree view of Curiosity's new home in Gale Crater. Also downlinked were two, higher-resolution Navcams providing the most detailed depiction to date of the surface adjacent to the rover.
"These Navcam images indicate that our powered descent stage did more than give us a great ride, it gave our science team an amazing freebie," said John Grotzinger, project scientist for the mission from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "The thrust from the rockets actually dug a one-and-a-half-foot-long [0.5-meter] trench in the surface. It appears we can see Martian bedrock on the bottom. Its depth below the surface is valuable data we can use going forward."
Another image set, courtesy of the Context Camera, or CTX, aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has pinpointed the final resting spots of the six, 55-pound (25-kilogram) entry ballast masses. The tungsten masses impacted the Martian surface at a high speed of about 7.5 miles (12 kilometers) from Curiosity's landing location.
Curiosity's latest images are available at: http://1.usa.gov/MfiyD0 .
Wednesday, the team deployed the 3.6 foot-tall (1.1-meter) camera mast, activated and gathered surface radiation data from the rover's Radiation Assessment Detector and concluded testing of the rover's high-gain antenna.
Curiosity carries 10 science instruments with a total mass 15 times as large as the science payloads on NASA's Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity. Some of the tools, such as a laser-firing instrument for checking rocks' elemental composition from a distance, are the first of their kind on Mars. Curiosity will use a drill and scoop, which are located at the end of its robotic arm, to gather soil and powdered samples of rock interiors, then sieve and parcel out these samples into the rover's analytical laboratory instruments.
To handle this science toolkit, Curiosity is twice as long and five times as heavy as Spirit or Opportunity. The Gale Crater landing site places the rover within driving distance of layers of the crater's interior mountain. Observations from orbit have identified clay and sulfate minerals in the lower layers, indicating a wet history.
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera is operated by the University of Arizona in Tucson. The instrument was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. in Boulder, Colo. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Exploration Rover projects are managed by JPL for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The rover was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver built the orbiter.
For more about NASA's Curiosity mission, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/mars and http://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/msl .
Follow the mission on Facebook and Twitter at: http://www.facebook.com/marscuriosity and http://www.twitter.com/marscuriosity .
For more about NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/mro .

 

 

Guy Webster/D.C. Agle 818-354-5011
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
Guy.webster@jpl.nasa.gov / agle@jpl.nasa.gov

Dwayne Brown 202-358-1726
NASA Headquarters, Washington
Dwayne.c.brown@nasa.gov

2012-235 This Picasso-like self portrait of NASA's Curiosity rover was taken by its Navigation cameras, located on the now-upright mast. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
› Full image and caption
› Curiosity latest images

These are the first two full-resolution images of the Martian surface from the Navigation cameras on NASA's Curiosity rover, which are located on the rover's "head" or mast. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

IQ

TOT

So do you think you can pass world'd easiest IQ test? in which most people fail, Are you genius? Reconsider that after taking this test!!

WORLD'S EASIEST IQ TEST (QUIZ)!

(Passing requires only 3 correct answers out of 10!)

Time yourself

QUESTIONS START HERE:

1) How long did the Hundred Years' War last ?

2) Which country makes Panama hats ?

3) From which animal do we get cat gut ?

4) In which month do Russians celebrate the October Revolution ?

5) What is a camel's hair brush made of ?

6) The Canary Islands in the Pacific are named after what animal ?

7) What was King George VI's first name ?

8) What color is a purple finch ?

9) Where are Chinese gooseberries from ?

10) What is the color of the black box in a commercial airplane ?

Remember, you need only 3 correct answers to pass.

TOMAROOW U WILL BE GIVEN ANS

Don't look down for answers so easily at least give a try... 

stephen hawking biography

Stephen Hawking was born January 8, 1942 in Oxford, England. From an early age, he showed a passion for science and the sky. At age 21, while studying cosmology at Cambridge, Hawking was diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). Despite his debilitating illness, he has done ground-breaking work in physics and cosmology and his several books strive to make science accessible to everyone.
         

                                                

Early Life

The eldest of Frank and Isobel Hawking's four children, Stephen William Hawking was born on the 300th anniversary of the death ofGalileo, which has long been a source of pride for the noted physicist. Stephen was born into a family of thinkers. At a time when few women thought of going to college, the Scottish-born Isobel earned her way into Oxford University in the 1930s, making her one of the college's first female students. Frank Hawking, another Oxford graduate, was a respected medical researcher with a specialty in tropical diseases.

Stephen Hawking's birth came at an inopportune time for his parents, who didn't have much money. The political climate was also tense, as England was dealing with World War II and the onslaught of German bombs. In an effort to seek a safer place to have their first child, Frank moved his pregnant wife from their London home to Oxford. The Hawkings would go on to have two other children, Mary (1943) and Philippa (1947). A second son, Edward, was adopted in 1956.

The Hawkings, as one close family friend described them, were an "eccentric" bunch. Dinner was often eaten in silence, each of the Hawkings intently reading a book. The family car was an old London taxi, and their home in St. Albans was a three-story fixer-upper that never quite got fixed. The Hawkings also kept bees in the basement and made fireworks in the greenhouse.

In 1950, Stephen's father took work as the head of the Division of Parasitology at the National Institute of Medical Research, and spent the winter months in Africa doing research. He wanted his eldest child to go into medicine, but from an early age Stephen showed a passion for science and the sky. That was evident to his mother, who, along with her children, often stretched out in the backyard on summer evenings to stare up at the stars. "Stephen always had a strong sense of wonder," she remembered. "And I could see that the stars would draw him."

Early in his academic life Stephen, while recognized as bright, was not an exceptional student. At one point in high school, his mother recalled, he was third from the bottom of his class. Instead, Stephen turned his mind loose on pursuits outside of school. He loved board games, and with a few close friends created new games of their own. At the age of 16 Stephen, along with several buddies, constructed a computer out of recycled parts for solving rudimentary mathematical equations.

He was also on the go a lot. "Always on the move," said a family friend. "Hardly ever still." With his sister Mary, Stephen, who loved to climb, devised different entry routesinto the family home. He remained active even after he entered Oxford University at the age of 17. He loved to dance, and also took an interest in rowing, becoming one of the Oxford rowing team's coxswain. 

To his father's chagrin, Hawking finally said no to medicine, instead expressing a desire to study mathematics. But since Oxford didn't offer a mathematics degree, Hawking gravitated toward physics and, more specifically, cosmology. 

By his own account,                     Hawking didn't put much time into his studies. He would later calculate that he averaged about an hour a day focusing on school. And yet he didn't really have to do much more than that. In 1962, he graduated with honors and moved on to Cambridge University for a Ph.D. in cosmology.

ALS Diagnosis

While Stephen first began to notice problems with his physical health at Oxford—on occasion he would trip and fall, or slur his speech— he didn't look into the problem until 1963, during his first year at Cambridge. For the most part, Hawking had kept these minor symptoms to himself. But when his father took notice of the condition, he sent Stephen to see a doctor. For the next two weeks, the 21-year-old college student made his home at a medical clinic, where he underwent a series of tests.

"They took a muscle sample from my arm, stuck electrodes into me, and injected some radio opaque fluid into my spine, and watched it going up and down with X-rays, as they tilted the bed," he said. "After all that, they didn't tell me what I had, except that it was not multiple sclerosis, and that I was an a-typical case."

Eventually, however, doctors did inform the Hawkings about what was ailing their son: He was in the early stages of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease). In a very simple sense, the nerves that controled his muscles were shutting down. Doctors gave him two and a half years to live.

It was devastating news for Stephen and his family. A few events, however, prevented him from becoming completely despondent. The first of these came while Hawking was still in the hospital. There, he shared a room with a boy suffering from leukemia. Relative to what his roommate was going through, Stephen reflected later, his situation seemed more tolerable. Not long after he was released from the hospital, Hawking had a dream that he was going to be executed. He said this dream made him realize that there were still things to do with his life.

But the most significant change in his life was the fact that he was in love. At a New Year's party in 1963, shortly before he had been diagnosed with ALS, Stephen Hawking met a young languages undergraduate named Jane Wilde. They were married in 1965.

In a sense, Hawking's disease helped him become the noted scientist he is today. Before the diagnosis, Stephen Hawking hadn't always focused on his studies. "I was bored with life before my illness," he said. "There had not seemed to be anything worth doing." With the suddenealization that he might not even live long enough to earn his Ph.D., Hawking poured himself into his work and research  

Research on Black Holes

Groundbreaking findings from another young cosmologist, Roger Penrose, about the fate of stars and the creation of black holes tapped into Hawking's own fascination with how the universe began. This set him on a career course that reshaped the way the world thinks about black holes and the universe.Research on Black Holes

While physical control over his body diminished (he'd be forced to use a wheelchair by 1969), the effects of his disease started to slow down. In 1968, a year after the birth of his son Robert, Stephen Hawking became a member of the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge.

The next few years were a fruitful time for Hawking. A daughter, Lucy, was born to Stephen and Jane in 1969 (a third child, Timothy, arrived 10 years later), while Hawking continued with his research. He then published his first book, the highly technical The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time (1975). He also teamed up with Penrose to expand upon his friend's earlier work.

In 1974, Stephen Hawking's research turned him into a celebrity within the scientific world when he showed that black holes aren't the information vacuums that scientists had thought they were. In simple terms, Hawking demonstrated that matter, in the form of radiation, can escape the gravitational force of a collapsed star. Hawking Radiation was born.

The announcement sent shock waves of excitement through the scientific world, and put Hawking on a path that's been marked by honors, notoriety and distinguished titles. He was named a fellow of the Royal Society at the age of 32, and later earned the prestigiousAlbert Einstein Award. In 1975 he journeyed to Rome, where he was honored with the Pius XI Gold Medal for Science from Pope Paul VI.

Teaching stints followed, too. One was at Caltech at Pasadena, California, where Hawking served as visiting professor for a year. Another was at Gonville & Caius College in Cambridge, England. In 1979, Hawking found himself back at Cambridge University, where he was named to one of teaching's most renowned posts: the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics. Dating back to 1663, the position has been held by just 14 other people, including Sir Isaac Newton.

A Brief History of Time

Hawking's ever-expanding career was accompanied, however, by his ever-worsening physical state. By the mid-1970s, the Hawking family had taken in one of Stephen's graduate students to help manage his care and work. He could still feed himself and get out of bed, but virtually everything else required assistance. In addition, his speech had become increasingly slurred, so that only those who knew him well could understand him. In 1985 he lost his voice for good following a tracheotomy. The resulting situation required 24-hour nursing care for the acclaimed physicist.

It also put in peril Hawking's ability to do his work. The predicamentaught the attention of a California computer programmer, who had developed a speaking program that could be directed by head or eye movement. The invention allowed Hawking to select words on a computer screen that were then passed through a speech synthesizer. At the time of its introduction, Hawking, who still had use of his fingers, selected his words with a handheld clicker. Today, with virtually all control of his body gone

Hawking directs the program through a cheek muscle attached to a sensor. 

Through the program, and the help of assistants, Stephen Hawking has continued to write at a prolific rate. His work has included numerous scientific papers, of course, but also information for the non-scientific community. 

In 1988 Hawking, a recipient of the Commander of the Order of the British Empire, catapulted to international prominence with the publication of A Brief History of Time. The short, informative book became an account of cosmology for the masses. The work was an instant success, spending more than four years atop the London Sunday Times' best-seller list. Since its publication, it has sold more than 25 million copies worldwide and been translated into more than 40 languages. But it also wasn't as easy to understand as some had hoped. So in 2001, Hawking followed up his book with The Universe in a Nutshell, which offered a more illustrated guide to cosmology's big theories. Four years later, he authored the even more accessible A Briefer History of Time. 

Together the books, along with Hawking's own research and papers, articulate the physicist's personal search for science's Holy Grail: a single unifying theory that can combine cosmology (the study of the big) with quantum mechanics (the study of the small) to explain how the universe began. It's this kind of ambitious thinking that has allowed Hawking, who claims he can think in 11 dimensions, to lay out some big possibilities for humankind. He's convinced that time travel is possible, and that humans may indeed colonize other planets in the future.

What Is a Black Hole?

An artist's drawing shows a large black hole pulling gas away from a nearby star. Image Credit: NASA E/PO, Sonoma State University, Aurore Simonnet


A black hole is a place in space where gravity pulls so much that even light can not get out. The gravity is so strong because matter has been squeezed into a tiny space. This can happen when a star is dying.

Because no light can get out, people can't see black holes. They are invisible. Space telescopes with special tools can help find black holes. The special tools can see how stars that are very close to black holes act differently than other stars.


How Big Are Black Holes?

Black holes can be big or small. Scientists think the smallest black holes are as small as just one atom. These black holes are very tiny but have the mass of a large mountain. Mass is the amount of matter, or "stuff," in an object.

Another kind of black hole is called "stellar." Its mass can be up to 20 times more than the mass of the sun. There may be many, many stellar mass black holes in Earth's galaxy. Earth's galaxy is called the Milky Way.

An artist's drawing shows the current view of the Milky Way galaxy. Scientific evidence shows that in the middle of the Milky Way is a supermassive black hole. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
View Larger Image
The largest black holes are called "supermassive." These black holes have masses that are more than 1 million suns together. Scientists have found proof that every large galaxy contains a supermassive black hole at its center. The supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy is called Sagittarius A. It has a mass equal to about 4 million suns and would fit inside a very large ball that could hold a few million Earths.


How Do Black Holes Form?

Scientists think the smallest black holes formed when the universe began.

Stellar black holes are made when the center of a very big star falls in upon itself, or collapses. When this happens, it causes a supernova. A supernova is an exploding star that blasts part of the star into space.

Scientists think supermassive black holes were made at the same time as the galaxy they are in.


This image of the center of the Milky Way galaxy was taken by the Chandra X-ray Observatory. Image Credit: NASA/CXC/MIT/F.K. Baganoff et al.
View Larger Image   →
If Black Holes Are "Black," How Do Scientists Know They Are There?

A black hole can not be seen because strong gravity pulls all of the light into the middle of the black hole. But scientists can see how the strong gravity affects the stars and gas around the black hole. Scientists can study stars to find out if they are flying around, or orbiting, a black hole.

When a black hole and a star are close together, high-energy light is made. This kind of light can not be seen with human eyes. Scientists use satellites and telescopes in space to see the high-energy light.


Could a Black Hole Destroy Earth?

Black holes do not go around in space eating stars, moons and planets. Earth will not fall into a black hole because no black hole is close enough to the solar system for Earth to do that.

This artist's drawing shows a supermassive black hole in the center of a galaxy. The black hole is surrounded by a cloud of material that is spiraling into it. Image Credit: NASA E/PO, Sonoma State University, Aurore Simonnet
View Larger Image   →
Even if a black hole the same mass as the sun were to take the place of the sun, Earth still would not fall in. The black hole would have the same gravity as the sun. Earth and the other planets would orbit the black hole as they orbit the sun now.

The sun will never turn into a black hole. The sun is not a big enough star to make a black hole.


How Is NASA Studying Black Holes?

NASA is using satellites and telescopes that are traveling in space to learn more about black holes. These spacecraft help scientists answer questions about the universe.

world record of century

Sachin Tendulkar finally hits 100th international century

                                   

NEW DELHI: Indian cricket icon Sachin Tendulkar, treated like God by his fans, ended the long and tiring wait for his 100th international century on Friday at Dhaka's Shere Bangla National Stadium.

Sachin hits 100th ton

Tendulkar, the leading run scorer in the history of both Test and one-day cricket, achieved the most-coveted ton by taking a single off Shakib Al Hasan against Bangladesh in Asia Cup. Tendulkar's century came off 138 balls and was studded with 10 fours and a six.

"I can't think of anything at this stage, it has been a tough phase for me," Tendulkar told Neo Cricket channel after his innings. "I started off the season well but was luckless. It does not matter how many hundreds you score, you still have to grind it out."

"When I got the 99th century, no one spoke about it. I guess it was the media which started it. Everywhere I went people were talking about my 100th hundred," he said.

He was finally out for 114, caught behind off Mashrafe bin Mortaza, who then ran over to shake his hand.

The master blaster's 99th century had come against South Africa on March 12, 2011, at Nagpur during the World Cup. Friday's century was Tendulkar's 49th in one-dayers; he has 51 Test centuries.

Tendulkar, who was left stranded on 99 international hundreds for a year and four days, played Test series against England, the West Indies and Australia. He also featured in the recently concluded triseries in Australia but his bid to become the first batsman to score 100 international hundreds remained unfulfilled, although he came close on a few occasions.

Tendulkar has set a benchmark unlikely to be surpassed in his lifetime, with his closest rival, Ricky Ponting, on 68 international centuries and approaching the twilight of his career at the age of 37.

Since his international debut at 16 against archrival Pakistan in 1989, Tendulkar has been compared to not only top batsmen of his era like Brian Lara and Inzamam-ul-Haq, but also to Australian great Donald Bradman as the best batsman ever.

Bradman, who retired in 1948 with an average of 99.94 runs, said Tendulkar reminded him of his own playing style.

Tendulkar has defied age and injury at every stage of his career. Whenever injuries threatened to stall his career, he pushed his body to the limit, and sometimes even beyond. Even the most threatening of all his injuries - the painful tennis elbow (in 2004) - couldn't break him. He cried out in agony, waited with hope for almost a year, tackled it with determination and ultimately conquered it like only he can.

In February 2010, Tendulkar became the first in world cricket to score a double hundred in one-day internationals, while in December 2010 he became the first to score 50 Test tons, both landmarks achieved against the best pace attack in world cricket - South Africa.

Wisden, regarded as the bible of cricket, named Tendulkar as the leading cricketer in the world for the year 2010.

In 2007, Wisden had identified Tendulkar as the player to have won such an award for 1998 - had it been instituted then.

Tendulkar, who realised his long-cherished dream when India won the World Cup in April 2011, was also named in Wisden's 2009 Test XI, at his accustomed number four position.

His passion for the game not only keeps him going, but also gives him the opportunity to reinvent himself. Each time he goes out on to the field he seems to be raising the bar for himself.