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THE HINDU IN SCHOOL I MONDAY I SEPTEMBER 22 I 2014

3SCIENCE & TECHWord of the dayHaywire (adj): out of control or disorder Used in a sentence: The traffic went haywire at the city's marketarea. Suggested by:  Prabu Santhosh  Your turn! Pick a word from today’s The Hindu in School whosemeaning you do not know and send it to us at school@thehindu.co.in(Subject: Word of the day)

Imagine a vast barren desert ofred dust and rocks, sand dunesswept by the winds, incrediblecanyons and the tallest moun-tain of the Solar System. Imag-ine a world where you couldeffortlessly jump 3 meters high,climb down steep craters, andset foot on everlasting carbondioxide ice, that turns into va-pour instead of melting. Wel-come to planet Mars, one of ournearest neighbours!

Like Earth, Mars orbitsaround the Sun. But Mars isfurther away from it, so the Sunappears smaller in the Martiansky. It would take around ninemonths to reach Mars fromEarth, and communicationswith Earth would be delayedbecause of the distance, as it isimpossible to send messages ata speed higher than the speedof light. It takes 8 minutes forthe light from the Sun to crossthe distance between Sun andEarth, and it would take up to20 minutes for a message fromEarth to reach Mars. Can youimagine a conversation where

you have to wait that long tohear your interlocutor's an-swers?

Rust and volcanic rocksMars was named after the

Roman god of war because ofits blood red colour in the sky.It is due to a thin layer of rustthat formed on the iron-richsoil of the planet. But if youwalk on Mars your footprintswould remove the rust and re-veal underlying black volcanicrocks. Mars is home to the tal-lest mountain of the Solar Sys-tem, Olympus Mons, which is agently sloped volcano. This gi-gantic mountain is 21,229 m

high, more than twice as high asMount Everest. But the climbwouldn't be as tiring as in theHimalayas: the gravity on Marsis only one third of Earth's, so

you would jump three timeshigher than usual!

It wouldn't be wise to stepout without a proper space suitthough. Mars atmosphere is in-deed very thin, and almost en-

tirely made of carbon dioxide.Earth atmosphere was proba-bly similar very long ago, butthe first living organisms onEarth consumed the carbon

dioxide to producethe oxygen we nowbreathe. On Mars,even some cloudsare made of carbondioxide!

Warm clothesare also advisable,

as the temperatures on Marsare low and can vary dramat-ically between day and night.They can reach a pleasant 20° Cat noon during summer, fall to-70° C the next night, and be as

low as -150° C in winter. A thinlayer of frost usually forms dur-ing the night, and there are ev-erlasting carbon dioxide icecaps in the polar regions. Thesharp differences of temper-ature can generate big duststorms. Dust storms on Marscan cover the entire planet andlast for months.

Mars once had rivers, lakes,and maybe even oceans like theEarth does. But water did notremain liquid very long, and isnow trapped as ice mixed withdust at the poles and inside therocks. Today we can only seetraces of the ancient dried-upwater channels, which consti-tute an amazing sight! Marsshows an example of a planetthat once looked very muchlike Earth before the appari-tion of life, but then evolveddifferently to become a harshand hostile environment.Would you like to visit it if itwere possible?

(Jonathan Freundlich is aPhD student at the Paris Ob-servatory, in France, workingon star formation and galaxyevolution.)

● Mars is home to the tallest mountain of the Solar System, OlympusMons, and to a 7km deep canyon named Valles Marineris, which is morethan 4, 000 km long.

● Water on Mars and Earth probably comes from asteroids made of icetravelling from the edge of the Solar System.

● In Hindu astrology, Mars is named Mangala and also associated with war.It is often identified with Kartikeya.

● Mangalyaan, launched on 5 November 2013, will observe the surface ofMars and study its atmosphere.

Jonathan Freundlich

A travel guide to MarsIndia’s Mars Orbiter Mission is due to reach its final orbit around Mars on

September 24. Here is a quick look into the red planet

Kasei Valles, a giantsystem of canyons, showstraces of ancient waterchannels and meteorimpacts on Mars. PHOTO: NASA/JPL/ARIZONASTATE UNIVERSITY, R. LUK

ASTROPHYSICAL SERIES: PART – 1

Are you fascinated byplanets and stars and as-tronomy in general?Here is a way to partici-pate in a small way in re-al science and help inunderstanding Mars bet-ter.

The National Aero-nautics and Space Ad-ministration (NASA),located in the U.S., is ask-ing for help in processingdata in the form of pic-tures of Mars taken bythe Rovers Curiosity andSpirit that have been sent to wander around the planet by its Marsmission. This is through “Be a Martian,” a citizen science project inwhich anyone can participate.

Find out details about this project by viewing the website http://blogs.plos.org/citizensci/2014/09/13/citizen-science-classrom-mapping-mars-martian-nasa/ and learn how this

works. Citizen science projects are those in which any citizen, even

without formal scientific training, can join and work and contributeto the advancement of science. All it takes is interest and the will tolearn. Be a Martian is one such project which involves identifyingregions on Mars.

All it requires is a computer with a reasonably fast internetconnection, a projector or smart board if you are working as a classand a colour printer.

Want to mapMars?

Here is a chance to be part of Nasa’s ‘Be aMartian’ project. Identify regions on Mars justfrom your classroom

! Students have the opportunity to try their hands at threetypes of Martian mapping which includes aligning photosto match topographic images, counting craters, andtagging physical features of the landscape.

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! Teaching materials that are supplied on Citizenshipwebsite, for the project, include a Mars atlas withdescriptions of different parts of the planet’s surface.

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! There are eight different videos, ranging from testing theCuriosity’s parachute to students designing humansettlements on Mars.

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BOSTON: There’s some truth to the effective-ness of folk remedies and old wives’ taleswhen it comes to serious medical issues,according to findings by a team from De-troit Medical Center.

Sonal Saraiya and her colleagues in Mi-chigan found that packing strips of curedpork in the nose of a child who suffers fromuncontrollable, life-threatening nose-bleeds can stop the haemorrhaging, a dis-covery that won them a 2014 Ig Nobelprize, the annual award for sometimesinane, yet often surprisingly practical, sci-entific discoveries.

This year’s winners honoured on Thurs-day at Harvard University by the Annals ofImprobable Research magazine included ateam of researchers who wondered if own-ing a cat was bad for your mental health;Japanese scientists who conducted exper-iments to find out if banana peels werereally as slippery as cartoons would haveus believe; and Norwegian biologists whotested whether reindeer on the Arctic ar-chipelago of Svalbard were frightened byhumans dressed to resemble polar bears.As has become the custom, real Nobel lau-

reates handed out the prizes and winnerswere given a maximum of 60 seconds todeliver their acceptance speech,

Sticking pork products up the patient’snose was a treatment of last resort whenconventional treatments had failed, Dr.Saraiya said, and was only used for a veryspecific condition known as Glanzmannthrombasthenia, a rare condition in which

blood does not properly clot. “We had to do some out-of-the-box

thinking,” she said. “So that’s where we putour heads together and thought to the ol-den days and what they used to do.”

The four-year-old child’s nostrils werepacked with cured pork twice, and accord-ing to their study, “the nasal vaults suc-cessfully stopped nasal haemorrhagepromptly (and) effectively.” The methodworked because “there are some clottingfactors in the pork... and the high level ofsalt will pull in a lot of fluid from the nose,”she said. Still, Dr. Soraiya does not recom-mend sticking pork up your nose for aroutine nosebleed, as it could cause in-fection. AP

Ig Nobel winner: Using pork to stop nosebleeds

Kiyoshi Mabuchi of Japan acceptsthe Physics Prize for his study"Frictional Coefficient under BananaSkin." PHOTO: REUTERS

The Ig Nobel Prizes are NobelPrizes given each year for tenunusual or trivial achievementsin scientific research. The statedaim of the prizes is to honourachievements that first makepeople laugh, and then makethem think.

Did you know that the plan-et Neptune was spottedmathematically even beforeit was first observed? Thatimplies that the one whoobserved Neptune knew ex-actly where to look for it.That someone was Germanastronomer Johann Gott-fried Galle. Not that no onebefore him had spotted theplanet. Only that, he wasthe first one to know he waslooking at the planet Nep-tune when he made his ob-servations.

If we are discussing thediscovery of Neptune, thenwe will have to start it fromUranus. We would actuallyhave to start with Galileo,who sketched the move-ment of what he thoughtwere the changing posi-tions of a fixed star, in 1613.

But since he never botheredto publish these findings,we might skip over 150years and get to 1781. Ura-nus was discovered in thatyear and it didn’t go unno-ticed that the planet was be-ing slightly pulled awayfrom its expected orbit,when compared to that pre-dicted by Newton’s laws ofgravitation.

The irregularities in theorbit of Uranus suggestedthat there might be grav-itational interference fromanother heavenly body.Alexis Bouvard, a Frenchastronomer, published as-tronomical tables of the or-bit of Uranus in 1821 andnoted these deviations,which he attributed to a hy-pothetical body.

Another Frenchman, Ur-bain Le Verrier, used theseanomalies to work out a set

of mathematical predic-tions. British mathemati-cian John Couch Adamsalso reached similar con-clusions, working inde-pendently. While LeVerrier made his predic-tions public, Adams kepthis work to himself and col-leagues at the University ofCambridge.

By 1846, Le Verrier knewthe mass and orbital path ofthe eighth planet, havingcompleted his calculations.But as he got nowhere withmembers of the French as-tronomical society, Le Ver-rier passed on hisinformation to Galle in theBerlin Observatory. OnSeptember 23, that yearGalle, assisted by his stu-dent Heinrich Louis d’Ar-rest, spotted Neptunewithin a degree of where LeVerrier predicted it would

be, thereby becoming thefirst to observe and confirmthe existence of the eighthplanet. He had received LeVerrier’s data that very day!

While Adams gave fullcredit to Le Verrier for theinformation that led toGalle’s discovery, it wasn’tequally well received by ev-eryone. Many in Englandstrongly believed thatAdams had also predictedthe existence of the planet,leading to a tense interna-tional dispute over priority.

The Royal Society, how-ever, gave the Copley medalin 1846 to Le Verrier for hisachievement, with no men-tion of Adams. While theproposal to name the planetLe Verrier fell flat, Le Ver-rier followed traditionalnomenclature to name theworld Neptune.

Neptune’s discovery was

one of those fine momentswhen science and mathworked in tandem, furtherconfirming Newtoniangravitational theory. Fran-cois Arago, a French phys-icist, mathematician andastronomer, probably hadthe best words to sum it allup. He referred to Le Ver-rier as the man who “dis-covered a planet with thepoint of his pen”.

Write to the author at ga-nesh.a.s@thehindu.co.in

Spotting Neptune,‘with the point of his pen’

This undated Nasa handout diagram shows the orbits of several moonslocated close to the planet Neptune. PHOTO: REUTERS

AN EYE FOR AN I

Neptune’s discovery was one of those fine moments when science and mathworked in tandem, further confirming Newtonian gravitational theory

A.S.Ganesh

The view of the SpaceX Falcon 9 launch to the International SpaceStation from Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air ForceStation, Florida on Sunday. PHOTO: AP

3-D printer for astronauts A SpaceX cargo shiprocketed toward theInternational SpaceStation on Sunday,carrying the first 3-Dprinter for astronautsin orbit. The spaceagency envisionsastronauts one daycranking out spareparts as needed. A$30 million device formeasuring oceanwinds is also flying upon Dragon, along with20 mice and 30 fruitflies for biologicalresearch and metalsamples for a golf clubmanufacturer.

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