mars" align="left" hspace="5" vspace="5" />These are 2 animations of the Mars Rover from take-off all the way to the landing and rock collecting. The first one is for the 2007 Mars landing and the second one is what the a 2009 Mars mission may look like.
Here is the description of the video:
This animation visulaizes launch in August 2007 and entry, descent, and landing of the Phoenix Mars Mission in May 2008. .. The animation was created by Maas Digital under the direction of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Solar System Visualization Project.
Have you ever wondered what you would weight on other planets like Mars? Well, I hear your weight depends on the size of the planet you are on or more importantly, the gravity of the planet. Larger planets have stronger gravity and make you weigh more and smaller planets with weaker gravity can make you very light.
Your weight is calculated as how much body mass you have and how much gravity is pulling down on you on the planet you are on.
mars and other planets in space">-> Check out this page and calculate your weight on the <-
Life on Earth is estimated to have first evolved some 3.8 billion years ago but human civilization is only about 6000 years old. The dinosaurs ruled the earth for about 160 million years (160,000,000), over 26,000 times longer. Lets all hope we make it that long.
Earth is estimated to weigh 6,585,600,000,000,000,000,000 tons and has a surface area of 200 million square miles of which 70% is sea water. There is so much sea water that the average depth of the ocean is 2 miles. The highest point is Mt. Everest (the one people keep killing themselves trying to climb, and the lowest point is the Dead Sea, the Sea that is so salty that you float and really cannot drown in unless you tried very hard because you can pretty much just sit in the water without sinking.
Space is a vacuum so no sound is heard, those loud space explosions only exist in the movies.
Our Sun is so massive that it burns (converts to helium) 700 million tons of hydrogen a second. If you figure a car weights about 2 tons, thats 350 million Chevy’s worth every second. It has so much hydrogen that it has done this for 4 billion years and will have enough to go for a few billion more… thats a lot of gas.
1.7 Billion years ago the oceans were red with rust and not blue.
Even though we feel like we are standing still, we are actually moving very fast. The Earth is moving so fast that if we could drive so fast, we could go all the way around in 7 minutes. (66,700 MPH)
Mercury is the planet closest to our Sun, but not the hottest, Venus is because its atmosphere has a greenhouse effect that keeps the heat in.
On Mercury the sky is always dark and the sun appears twice as large as here. no matter if its day or night, you could always see billions of stars in the dark sky. Also, a year on Mercury is only 88 days long, but a full day (from sunset to sunrise) takes 176 days. That would make for one long school day. Mercury is also a small planet only a little bigger than the moon.
Jupiter is the largest planet with a mass 318 time that of Earth. The huge mass makes the interior of Jupiter 100 million times that of Earth’s surface pressure. That means it would most likely squish anything that went there. Jupiter has 16 known moons and the giant red spot is actually a large storm the size of our planet that has been going on for maybe as long as a few hundred years. Now thats a long stretch of bad weather .
The star in our system is called the Sun. It is really amazing for many reasons especially that the energy the Sun makes lets all of us on Earth live.
So how much energy does the Sun make and how does it work?
The Sun was born about 4.6 billion years ago and is made from space dust and gas, gravity eventally made all the space gas into the flaming ball shape we see in our sky.
Because of the huge amount of gravity, material in the center of the cloud was squeezed so tightly that it became hot enough to ignite nuclear fusion.
The Sun fuses hydrogen to make helium within the very middle of the Sun called the core.
How much Hydrogen does it burn or fuse? tons, literally, every second the Sun fuses or burns about 600 million tons of hydrogen, yielding 596 million tons of helium. The remaining four tons of hydrogen are converted to energy, which makes the Sun shine. As far as that number goes it is beyond what I can even imagine. I can not even picture how large 600 million tons is and that is per second!
I used to believe that there were things that are forever. The Earth, the Sun, the Moon, even the Rocks. But that is not true. Nothing in the Universe lasts forever and even something as giant and everlasting as the Sun, will eventually die.
But die may not be the correct word. matter is not lost, it just becomes something else. Stellar recycling.
Scientists believe that our Sun is half way through its lifecycle and in a few billion years, after it runs out of most of the hydrogen it uses, it will begin to expand as it starts burning other gasses and turn into a red giant. At the red giant stage the Sun may in fact get so large that it will engulf many of the planets around it. The planets that do not get engulfed by the gorged Sun, will become much hotter and evoporating things like water and ice into space.
The large Sun will begin to shed its layers over billions of years, creating a nebula and the Sun itself will become a small dwarf star untill it dies out.
1- Core. The Sun’s nuclear “furnace,” where fusion reactions initially combine hydrogen atoms to produce helium, yielding energy in the process.
2 -Radiative Zone. Energy moves through a surrounding envelope of gas toward the Sun’s surface.
3- Convection Zone. Big “bubbles” of hot gas transport energy to the surface.
4- Photosphere. The Sun’s visible surface. Because of its high temperature, it glows yellow.
5- Sunspot. A magnetic “storm” on the Sun’s surface.
Prominence. An eruption of hot gas that can extend thousands of miles into space.
6- Corona. The Sun’s outer atmosphere, which is heated by the magnetic field to millions of degrees.
mars" align="left" hspace="5" vspace="5" />These are 2 animations of the Mars Rover from take-off all the way to the landing and rock collecting. The first one is for the 2007 Mars landing and the second one is what the a 2009 Mars mission may look like.
