Kids Need Science is devoted to demystifying and explaining science, technology, engineering and math words, names, and concepts. Check back often for a science, technology, engineering or math word defined and explained every day.
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D16. Sur la route du Grand Canyon, petit détour par Meteor Crater (un immense cratère spectaculaire causé par la collision d’une météorite), puis...
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New cluster of crater impacts on Mars discovered by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter
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Mickey Mouse Spotted on Mercury ! NASA image acquired: June 03, 2012
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This blog has been dedicated for over a year to telling the stories of words and word origins in science. Science (along with math, technology and engineering) is a rich field for etymologists, as the discoveries of science and the creation of new words almost always have a great back story to go with the word.
Today, however, is your chance to help create a science word, by naming the two newest moons of Pluto: currently known as P4 and P5. First the current names:
Pluto is the Roman name for the Greek god Hades, master of the underworld. The underworld was the place where the souls of the departed go after they die. After Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto from the Lowell Observatory in 1930, a little girl named Venetia Burney from Oxford, England suggested that he name it “Pluto”. Tombaugh liked the idea, in part because the initial letters “PL” reminded him of Percival Lowell, namesake for the obsevatory and the first to propose the existence of a “Planet X”.
Charon is the name of Pluto’s largest and innermost moon. It was discovered in 1978 by James Christy. In mythology, Charon was the boatsman who ferried the souls of the dead across the river Styx into the underworld.
Nix and Hydra are the names of Pluto’s next two moons, discovered in 2005 in Hubble telescope images by a team of astronomers led by Hal Weaver and Alan Stern. Nix is the goddess of the night and Hydra is the name of the many-headed monster who guarded one of entrances to the underworld. These names, with initials “NH”, were chosen to match the initials of New Horizons, the NASA spacecraft now on its way to Pluto.
Here is a little bit of background on the names that currently appear on the ballot for the new moons:
Acheron: One of the five rivers of the underworld, symbolizing pain.
Alecto: One of the furies, hideous snake-haired monsters who were servants of Hades. It was the job of Alecto to punish mortals for their crimes of anger.
Cerberus/Kerberos: The three-headed dog who guards the gates to the underworld, preventing the the dead from escaping.
Erebus: A primordial god and the personification of darkness. With Nyx, he fathered many children including Hypnos and Styx.
Eurydice: The wife of Orpheus, for whom he entered the underworld. During their journey home, Orpheus violated his agreement with Persephone not to look back, and Eurydice was lost forever.
Heracles/Hercules: The heroic demigod who slew the Hydra, entered the underworld and who also carried Cerberus back. He is one of very few who ever returned from the underworld.
Hypnos: A son of Nyx and the personification of sleep.
Lethe: One of the five rivers of the underworld, symbolizing oblivion. It flows through the cave of Hypnos and merges with the river Styx.
Obol/Obolus: The coin paid to Charon in order to obtain passage across the river Styx.
Orpheus/Orfeus: A gifted musician who entered the underworld to retrieve his wife Eurydice. He charmed Hades and Persephone with his music, and became the only mortal ever to return from the underworld.
Persephone/Proserpina: A goddess kidnapped by Hades to become the queen of the underworld. She is the symbolizes vegetation and rebirth.
Styx: The river that separates Earth from the underworld. This name also refers to the goddess of the river Styx, daughter of Nyx and Erebus.
You can vote here: www.plutorocks.com
Special thanks to www.space.com and www.plutorocks.com for this content.
The asteroid Lutetia lies almost directly in the plane of the ecliptic approximately 230 million miles from the sun, on average. It was discovered in 1852 by the German-French painter, astronomer and polymath Hermann Goldschmidt, who discovered it not long after purchasing a telescope he financed by selling paintings of Galileo produced on a recent trip to Florence. Although he originally believed that he had discovered a new planet, he soon confirmed that it was indeed an asteroid and named it after the Roman name for the city that eventually became Paris: Lutetia Parisiorum, named for the Gallic tribe the Parisii who first inhabited the island later known as Île de la Cité. In July of 2010 the French spacecraft the Rosetta passed approximately 1800 miles away from Lutetia and took several hundred high resolution photographs, mostly of the north pole of the asteroid. Lutetia is a medium sized asteroid, somewhat egg shaped, 100 kilometers in diameter and 120 kilometers in diameter along its longest axis. In March 2011 the International Astronomical Union agreed to a naming system for Lutetia’s features, allowing them to be named for regions, cities and rivers in Roman Gaul: Baetica, Achaia, Etruria, Narbonensis, Noricum, Pannonia, and Raetia.
Close up image of Lutetia and image of crater cluser on Lutetia by ESA 2011 MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/RSSD/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA. Orbit of Lutetia courtesy NASA/JPL, used with permission.
Despite the predictions to the contrary, both the first day of winter and the shortest day of the year will happen today at 11:12 UTC, the morning of the winter solstice. The word solstice is relatively old in English, dating back to the 13th century. Solstice derives from the Latin word solstitium meaning very literally the point at which the sun stands still, a combination of the words sol meaning sun and the past participial stem of sistere meaning to come to a stop, make stand still. Celebrated thoughout history as either a secular or religious day, the solstice marks the point on the ecliptic when the Northern Hemisphere is pointed most away from the sun and therefore has the shortest day. Technically if the Mayans are correct and the world ends today, it really will be not only the shortest day of the year but the shortest day of all time. Look for my post on that tomorrow.
Image of 2011 winter solstice from space and solstice and equinox illustration courtesy NASA. Meme of ‘axial tilt’ authorship unknown.
Today’s post is for my B and R. Happy First Day of Winter, Boys!
Today marks one of the most significant milestones in the history of science. On November 3, 1957, a Moscow stray dog named Laika ( Лайка, meaning either Barky or Eskimo Husky, depending on the dictionary, though she was originally named Kudryavka (Кудрявка) meaning Little Curly) was launched into orbit by the Soviet Union. Laika’s historic voyage was on board the Sputnik 2, only the second craft to leave the earth’s atmosphere and journey into space, launched only one month after Sputnik 1’s historic voyage.
The significance of this spaceflight cannot be underestimated-Laika became the first living organism to leave the planet! The Russian Space agency had outfitted Laika’s cabin with a harness, a food dispenser, a bag to collect waste and an oxygen replenishment system. Laika was launched with the full knowledge that she would not survive the journey-scientists had no way of knowing if humans could withstand the rigors of spaceflight. Her sacrifice paved the way for generations of humans to follow-the telemetry on her body gave back invaluable information on heart rate, blood pressure, g-forces. It wasn’t disclosed until 2002 that Laika died on far earlier than anticipated, raising a public outcry. Pause today to think of this dog-her voyage paved the way for countless missions.
Although we now take for granted the long term success of the International Space Station, it wasn’t too long ago that we were totally earthbound. That changed on this day, October 12, 1964 when the Soviet Union launched the Voskhod 1 (Восхо́д), the first manned capsule to carry more than one person into space. The Voskhod program was a proof of concept program to test systems for more ambitious space exploration. The Voskhod program was notable for several firsts: the first multi-person mission to space (Cosmonauts Komarov, Yegorov and Feoktistov in the Voskhod 1) and the first space walk (Belyayev and Leonov in Voskhod 2). The Vostok and Voskhod programs provided the framework for what became the Soyuz program and ultimately the current ISS.
The Russian word Voskhod (Восхо́д) means sunrise and is a combination of the Russian words vos- (from vostok восток) meaning east and xodete (ходить) meaning go or rise.
Image of the Voskhod capsule being assembled courtesy Energiea.
On this day in 1958, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration opened for space exploration. Signed into law in July 1958 by President Dwight Eisenhower, as the National Aeronautics and Space Act, establishing NASA. NASA absorbed its 46-year-old predecessor NACA ( National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics) intact, taking its 8,000 employees, its annual budget of $100 million, and three major research laboratories. A NASA seal was approved by President Eisenhower in 1959. Since that day, NASA’s contributions to the United States and humanity in general have been vast-we have walked on the moon, sent probes out beyond the heliosphere, peered 13-16 billion light years out to the edge of the universe. Any one of these accomplishments would have been significant on their own merits-the fact that a single agency has overseen such a staggering array of projects is simply amazing. Happy Birthday, NASA!
NASA logos courtesy NASA.
This may be the newest coined word to be featured here, and get used to it, because you will be hearing it more and more in the next decade: taikonaut. Official English-language texts issued by the government of the People’s Republic of China use astronaut while texts in Russian use космонавт (kosmonavt). In official Chinese-language texts, the terms “yǔhángyuán” (宇航员, “sailing personnel in universe”) for cosmonaut and “hángtiānyuán” (航天员, “sailing personnel in sky”) for astronaut have long been used. The phrase “tàikōng rén” (太空人, “spaceman”) is often used in Taiwan and Hong Kong.
The term taikonaut is used by some English-language news media organizations for professional space travelers from China. The word has featured in the Longman and Oxford English dictionaries, the latter of which describes it as “a hybrid of the Chinese term taikong meaning space and the Greek naut meaning sailor; the term became more common in 2003 when China sent its first astronaut Yang Liwei into space aboard the Shenzhou 5 spacecraft. This is the term used by Xinhua in the English version of the Chinese People’s Daily since the advent of the Chinese space program. The origin of the term is unclear; as early as May 1998, Chiew Lee Yih (趙裡昱) from Malaysia, used it in newsgroups.
Welcome home, taikonauts, and congratulations on your successful mission!
Images courtesy the Chinese Space Agency. Definition courtesy Wikipedia under Creative Commons 3.0 license.
On May 10, 1930 America’s first modern planetarium was dedicated: the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, Illinois. Max Adler created the museum and planetarium after seeing the first projecters in Europe in the 1920s. The Adler opened two days later on his birthday, May 12.
The word planetarium is a combination of the Late Latin planeta with the Latin suffix -arium meaning a place for. The word planet comes from the Ancient Greek: (asteres) planetai meaning wandering (stars).
While the modern planetarium with electric light projectors date only from the early twentieth century, rudimentary but highly accurate planetariums have existed since antiquity, starting notably with Archimedes.
Image of the Adler Planetarium courtesy Tony the Tiger (Antonio Vernon) under a Creative Commons 3.0 license.
If you studied in Latin in school, you would probably be very tempted to think that the Modern English word day derived from the Latin word dies, but you would be wrong. In fact, our word day comes from Old English dæg, meaning day or sometimes lifetime, of Germanic origin, related to Dutch dag and German Tag. While every language throughout history has had a word to denote the passing of a single day, its precise, scientific definition is relatively modern. Efforts to measure and quantify a day go back thousands of years-water clocks and sundials have been found in Egyptian tombs among other places.
So how do we define a day now, if not by the rising and setting of the sun as our ancestors did? In 1967, the second was redefined in terms of the wavelength of light, and it became the SI base unit of time. The unit of measurement for time called a day was redefined in 1967 as 86,400 SI seconds and symbolized d, which although it is not a unit in SI is considered acceptable to use.
Image of the Earth rotating through a single day taken by the Galileo space probe in 1990 on its first fly-by of Earth as it gained speed to travel to the outer planets, courtesy of NASA.
Continuing on the theme of words completely unchanged since antiquity with new and precise scientific uses, today’s word satellite comes from the Latin word satelles (satellitem is the closest Latin form) meaning an attendant, follower, courtier or life-guard. The great German mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler is credited as the first to use satellite to describe a moon around a planet. The first use of satellite to indicate a man-made object was 1936, over twenty years before the Russians actually accomplished it with the launch on October 4, 1957 of the satellite Sputnik. The word Sputnik-Cпутник-1-(the Russians, anticipating more satellites, already called it Sputnik 1) is the combination of the Russian preposition c- (the s- sound, when added to the beginning of a Russian word means with) and the Old Church Slavonic root word poti meaning a road, way or journey, ultimately meaning a traveling companion. Sputnik 1 broadcast its simple radio signal for 22 days before falling silent on this day in 1957.
Currently the United States Space Surveillance Network tracks 22,000 objects in space larger than 4 inches, of which only around 1,000 remain functional satellites. Just over a month ago today one of the larger satellites, the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite fell out of orbit and into the Pacific Ocean. Larger than a school bus and weighing over 13 tons, the majority of the satellite burned up in the atmosphere.
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http://www.talkingscience.org/category/parent/science-dad/
Sputnik replica image courtesy NASA, currently on view at the Smithsonian Institution Air and Space Museum. UARS pre-deployment photo also courtesy NASA.
