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Own an Actual Piece of an American Space Travel Icon The Space Shuttle Atlantis is a retired Space Shuttle orbiter in the Space Shuttle fleet belonging to NASA. The last |
mission of Atlantis was STS-135, the last flight before the Shuttle program ended. By the end of its final mission, Atlantis had orbited the Earth 4,848 times, traveling nearly 126,000,000 |
mi in space or more than 525 times the distance from the Earth to the Moon. This photograph of the Atlantis taking off contains a piece of cargo bay liner |
OurDocuments.gov. Featuring 100 milestone documents of American history from the National Archives. Includes images of original primary source documents, lesson plans, teacher and student competitions, and educational resources. In 1866 the Russian government offered to sell the territory of Alaska to the United States... |
enthusiastic about the prospects of American Expansion, negotiated the deal for the Americans. Edouard de Stoeckl, Russian minister to the United States, negotiated for the Russians. On March 30, 1867, the two parties agreed that the United States would pay Russia $7.2 million for the territory of Alaska. For less |
check for $7.2 million was made payable to the Russian Minister to the United States Edouard de Stoeckl, who negotiated the deal for the Russians. Also shown here is the Treaty of Cession, signed by Tzar Alexander II, which formally concluded the agreement for the purchase of Alaska from Russia. |
Filed under: Foundational Hand After studying the proportions of the Foundational Hand letters, the next step is to start writing the letters. Each letter is constructed rather than written. The |
letters are made up of a combination of pen strokes, which are only made in a top – down or left – right direction. The pen is never pushed up. |
When we studied the proportions of the Foundational Hand we could group the letters according to their widths. Now, we can group them according to the order and direction of |
the pen strokes. You may find it useful to look at the construction grid whilst studying the order and direction of the letters. The first group consists of the letters |
c, e, and o. These letters are based on the circle shape. This shape is produced with two pen strokes. Visualise a clock face and start the first stroke at |
approximately the 11, and finish it in an anti-clockwise direction at 5. The second stroke starts again at the 11 and finishes in a clockwise direction on the 5 to |
complete the letter o. The first pen-stroke for the letters c and e are the same as the first of the letter o. The second pen-stroke on the c and |
e are shorter and finish around the 1 position on the imaginary clock face. Finally, the letter e has a third stroke, starting at the end of the second stroke |
and finishes when it touches the first stroke. The next group of letters are d, q, b and p. All these letters combine curved and straight pen strokes. When writing |
these letters it can be useful to think of the underlying circle shape, which your pen will leave or join at certain points depending upon which letter is being written. |
The first stroke of the b starts at the ascender height of the letter, which can be eyed in at just under half the x-height (body height of letters with |
no ascender or descender). Continue the ascender stroke of the b until it ‘picks up’ the circle shape, follow round the circle until the pen reaches the 5 on the |
imaginary clock face. The second stroke starts on the first stroke following the circle round until it touches the end of the first stroke. The letter d is similar to |
the c except it has a third stroke for the ascender, which will touch the ends of the first and second stroke being for finishing on the write-line. Letter p |
starts with a vertical stroke from the x-height down to the imaginary descender line, which is just under half the x-height below the write-line. The second and third strokes are |
curved, starting on the descender stroke and following round the imaginary circle. The letter q is almost the same as the d, except it has a descender stroke rather than |
an ascender stroke. Letters a, h, m, n, r All these letters combine curved and straight pen strokes. Once again, think of the underlying circle shape, which your pen will |
leave or join at certain points depending upon the letter being written. The Letter h consists of two pen strokes. The first is a vertical ascender stroke. The second stroke |
starts curved, follows the circle round, then leaves it and becomes straight. The letter n is produced exactly the same way as the letter h, except the first stroke is |
not so tall as it starts on the x-height line. The first two pen strokes of the letter m are the same as the letter n. Then a third stroke |
is added which is identical to the second stroke. The letter r is also written the same way as the letter n except the second stroke finishes at the point |
where the circle would have been left and the straight is picked up. The first stroke of letter a is the same as the second stroke of the letters h, |
m and n. The second stroke follows the circle. Finally, the third stroke starts at the same point as the second stroke, but is a straight line at a 30° |
angle and touches the first stroke. The next group of letters are l, u and t. These letters are straight-forward. The letter l is the same as the first stroke |
of letter b. The letter u is also similar to the first stroke of letter b except it starts lower down. The second stroke starts on the x-height line and |
finishes on the write-line. Letter t has the same first stroke as letter u. It is completed by a second horizontal stroke. The following letters k, v, w, x, y |
and z are made of at least one diagonal pen stroke. The letter k starts with a vertical ascender stroke, then a second stroke diagonal stroke which joins the vertical |
stroke. The final stroke is also diagonal and starts where the first and second stroke meet and stops when it touches the write-line. If you look closely you will see |
it goes further out than the second stroke. This makes the letter look more balanced. If the end of these two pen-strokes lined up the letter would look like it |
is about to fall over. Letter v is simply two diagonal strokes and these are repeated to produce the letter w. The letter y is the same as the v |
except the second stroke is extended until to create a descender stroke. Letter x is a little different, you need to create it in such a way that the two |
stroke cross slightly above the half-way mark on the x-height. This means the top part will be slightly smaller than the bottom which will give the letter a better balance. |
Finally, in this group is letter z. The easiest way to produce this is with the two horizontal pen strokes, thenjoin these two strokes with a diagonal pen-stroke to complete |
the letter. Now for the hardest letters; f, g and s. Out of these three letters, f is the simplest. It starts with a vertical ascender stroke – except this |
is not as tall as the other ascender strokes we have produced so far. This is because we have to allow for the second curved stroke. The overall height of |
these two strokes should be the same as other letters that have an ascender. Finally, we need a horizontal stroke to complete the letter. Which will you find the hardest |
letter g or s? These are trickier because unlike all the other letters we have written they do not relate so well to the grid. The letter g is made |
of a circle shape, with an oval/bowl shape under the write-line. You can see the letter g is made of three pen-strokes. The first stroke is just like the first |
stroke of the letter o for example, except it is a smaller. The second stroke starts like the second stroke of the letter o, but when it joins the first |
stroke it continues and changes direction in the gap between the bottom of the shape and the write-line. The third stroke completes the oval shape. Finally, we have a little |
fourth stroke to complete the letter. The letter s is made up of three strokes. The first stroke is sort of an s shape! The second and third strokes complete |
the letter s. These are easier to get right than the first stroke because they basically follow the circle shape on our construction grid. The secret to this letter is |
to make both ‘ends’ of the first stroke not too curved. Because the other two strokes are curved they will compensate and give the overall correct shape. Finally, we are |
left with the letters i and j, which are made from one pen-stroke. You just need to remember to curve the end of the stroke when writing the letter j. |
When it comes to Spanish-style colonial charm, few cities in the Western Hemisphere can rival Old San Juan. But that doesn’t mean that Puerto Rico’s historical significance is exclusively within the capital city’s walls. Roughly 100 miles southwest of San Juan, the lovely town of San Germán holds the venerable |
distinction of being Puerto Rico’s second oldest city. Founded in 1573 and named after King Ferdinand the Catholic’s second wife Germaine of Foix, San Germán became the island’s first settlement outside of San Juan. Its significance was such that the island was first divided into the San Juan Party and |
the San Germán Party. The town also became the focal point from which other settlements were established, thus earning the nickname ‘Ciudad Fundadora de Pueblos’ (roughly, Town-Founding City). But while San Juan went on to grow exponentially beyond the old city walls and other cities like Ponce, Mayagüez, Arecibo or |
Caguas grew in population and importance, San Germán remained a sleepy colonial town and one of the best-kept secrets within the island. From a historical perspective, San Germán’s most famous landmark is Porta Coeli Church. One of the earliest examples of Gothic architecture in the Americas, the chapel was originally |
built as a convent in 1609 by the Dominican Order. It was reconstructed during the 18th century and expanded with a single nave church of rubble masonry. Listed in 1976 in the U.S. National Register of Historic Places, Porta Coeli was restored by the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture and |
now houses the Museo de Arte Religioso, which showcases religious paintings and wooden carvings dating back from the 18th and 19th centuries. Porta Coeli overlooks quaint Plazuela Santo Domingo, an elonganted, cobblestoned square enclosed by pastel-colored, colonial-style houses. A block away sits the town’s main squar... |
where the operational church of San Germán de Auxerre is located. Both Porta Coeli and San Germán de Auxerre are part of the San Germán Historic District, which was also listed in the U.S. National Register of Historic Places in 1994 and includes about 100 significant buildings. Though San Germán |
has long since lost its 16th-century designation as Puerto Rico’s most important city after San Juan, the town is nonetheless a regional powerhouse in southwestern Puerto Rico, housing important insitutions as the main campus of Universidad Interamericana (Interamerican University). Sports enthusiasts will also appreci... |
The basic element in solar modules The wafers are further processed to solar cells in the third production step. They form the basic element of the resulting solar modules. The cells already possess all of the technical attributes necessary to |
generate electricity from sunlight. Positive and negative charge carriers are released in the cells through light radiation causing electrical current (direct current) to flow. The "Cell" business division is part of SolarWorld subsidiary Deutsche Cell GmbH and SolarWorld Industries America |
LP. Here, solar cells are produced from the preliminary product, the solar silicon wafer. The group manufactures both monocrystalline as well as polycrystalline solar cells. The monocrystalline as well as polycrystalline solar cells are produced around the clock in one |
of the most advanced solar cell production facilities. The wafers are produced in the clean rooms of the Deutsche Cell GmbH using the most cutting edge process facilities with the highest level of automation. Through the fully integrated production concept, |
it is possible to flexibly control the use of all auxiliary materials necessary for production and to continuously optimize material utilization during operation. This concept allows us to assure the unique quality standard of our solar cells and simultaneously reduce |
the loss rate compared to conventional processes. This not only lowers production costs, it adds to the expertise in the solar cell production for the SolarWorld group. The wafer is first cleaned of all damage caused by cutting and then |
textured. A p/n junction is created by means of phosphorous diffusion which makes the silicon conductive. In the next step, the phosphorus glass layer produced by diffusion is removed. An anti-reflection layer is added. This which reduces optical losses and |
ensures electrical passivation of the surface is added. Then, the contacts are attached to the front and back along with a rear contact. Finally, every individual solar cell is tested for its optical qualities and the electrical efficiency measured. |
by Staff Writers Chicago IL (SPX) Jan 11, 2013 Technologically valuable ultrastable glasses can be produced in days or hours with properties corresponding to those that have been aged for thousands of years, computational and laboratory studies have confirmed. Aging makes for higher quality glassy materials because the... |
of years, but manufacturers must work faster. Armed with a better understanding of how glasses age and evolve, researchers at the universities of Chicago and Wisconsin-Madison raise the possibility of designing a new class of materials at the molecular level via a vapor-deposition process. "In attempts to work with age... |
Professor in Molecular Theory and Simulations. "Amber is a glass that has been aged millions of years, but you cannot engineer that material. You get what you get." de Pablo and Wisconsin co-authors Sadanand Singh and Mark Ediger report their findings in the latest issue of Nature Materials. Ultrastable glasses could f... |
The latter may sound surprising, but drugs with the amorphous molecular structure of ultrastable glass could avoid crystallization during storage and be delivered more rapidly in the bloodstream than pharmaceuticals with a semi-crystalline structure. Amorphous metals, likewise, are better for high-impact applications t... |
engineering at UW-Madison, carried out with de Pablo to follow-up some intriguing results from Ediger's laboratory. Growing stable glasses Several years ago, he discovered that glasses grown this way on a specially prepared surface that is kept within a certain temperature range exhibit far more stability than ordinary... |
recognize the significance of what they had done, Ediger said. Ediger speculated that growing glasses under these conditions, which he compares to the Tetris video game, gives molecules extra room to arrange themselves into a more stable configuration. But he needed Singh and de Pablo's computer simulations to confirm ... |
entirely new material. "There's interest in making these materials on the computer because you have direct access to the structure, and you can therefore determine the relationship between the arrangement of the molecules and the physical properties that you measure," said de Pablo, a former UW-Madison faculty member w... |
simulating the evolution of glasses on a computer. Scientists can cool a glassy material at the rate of one degree per second in the laboratory, but the slowest computational studies can only simulate cooling at a rate of 100 million degrees per second. "We cannot cool it any slower because the calculations would take ... |
that there is no correlation between the mechanical properties of a glass and the molecular structure; that somehow the properties of a glass are "hidden" somewhere and that there are no obvious structural signatures," de Pablo said. Creating better materials Ultrastable glasses achieve their stability in a manner anal... |
various configurations that rain from the top of the screen. "This is a little bit like the molecules in my deposition apparatus raining down onto this surface, and the goal is to perfectly pack a film, not to have any voids left," Ediger said. The object of Tetris is to manipulate the objects so that they pack into a ... |
bottom of the screen. "The difference is, when you play the game, you have to actively manipulate the pieces in order to build a well-packed solid," Ediger said. "In the vapor deposition, nature does it for us." But in Tetris and experiments alike, when the objects or molecules descend too quickly, the result is a poor... |
either rain the molecules too fast or choose a low temperature at which there's no mobility at the surface, then this trick doesn't work," Ediger said. Then it would be like taking a bucket of odd-shaped pieces and just dumping them on the floor. There are all sorts of voids and gaps because the molecules didn't have a... |
of packing." "Ultrastable glasses from in silico vapor deposition," by Sadamand Singh, M.D. Ediger and Juan J. de Pablo," Nature Materials. National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy. University of Chicago Space Technology News - Applications and Research |The content herein, unless otherwise known t... |
are copyright Agence France-Presse, United Press International and Indo-Asia News Service. ESA Portal Reports are copyright European Space Agency. All NASA sourced material is public domain. Additional copyrights may apply in whole or part to other bona fide parties. Advertising does not imply endorsement,agreement or ... |
Mission controllers received confirmation today that NASA's Dawn spacecraft has escaped from the gentle gravitational grip of the giant asteroid Vesta. Dawn is now officially on its way to its second destination, the dwarf planet Ceres. Dawn departed from Vesta at about 11:26 p.m. PDT on Sept. 4 (2:26 a.m. EDT on Sept.... |
the departure and that the spacecraft is now traveling toward Ceres. "As we respectfully say goodbye to Vesta and reflect on the amazing discoveries over the past year, we eagerly look forward to the next phase of our adventure at Ceres, where even more exciting discoveries await," said Robert Mase, Dawn project manage... |
27, 2007, Dawn slipped into orbit around Vesta on July 15, 2011 PDT (July 16 EDT). Over the past year, Dawn has comprehensively mapped this previously uncharted world, revealing an exotic and diverse planetary building block. The findings are helping scientists unlock some of the secrets of how the solar system, includ... |
Dawn is a project of the directorate's Discovery Program, managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. UCLA is responsible for overall Dawn mission science. Orbital Sciences Corp. in Dulles, Va., designed and built the spacecraft. The German Aerospace Center, the Max Planck Institute for Solar sys... |
in 1998. A Russian Typhoon-class nuclear submarine The unusual launch was the first time a commercial payload had ever been sent from Earth into orbit from a submarine and the first commercial space launch in the history of the Russian Navy. The satellites named TUBSAT were launched on a Shitl rocket which was a conver... |
rocket family is one of a range of space launch vehicles derived from decommissioned ballistic missiles offered for sale by Russia after the Cold War. The industrial design bureau Makeyev OKB had been formed by the former Soviet Union in the 1950s to produce a storable liquid fuel rocket family. Back then, those missil... |
for use by the navy. Makeyev went on to design and manufacture descendents of the R-11 family, including the infamous Scud-B missile and nearly all of Russia's submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs). In the 1990s, Makeyev and other OKBs marketed a variety of space rockets converted from surplus SLRBs, which coul... |
the military SLBM, which later would become the Shitl space rocket, was known as R-29RM and SS-N-23. The manufacturer was designated RSM-54. Shitl is a three-stage liquid-fuel rocket. The satellites replaced the nuclear warhead inside a standard R-29RM re-entry vehicle atop the SS-N-23. The submarine launch plaform was... |
Shitl's maiden flight took place July 7, 1998, while the submarine was in a Barents Sea firing range off the coast of the Kolskiy Peninsula at 69.3 degrees N by 35.3 degrees E. Prior to launch, the space flight had been viewed as a risk because a different one of the Northern fleet's Delta-class submarines had suffered... |
tubes on May 5, 1998. The Shtil's former warhead faring housed an Israeli instrument package and the German satellites TUBSAT-N and TUBSAT N-1. The tiny satellites, referred to as nanosatellites, were built and operated by the Technische Universitat Berlin (TUB). Each TUBSAT carried small store-and-forward communicatio... |
in elliptical orbits ranging from 250 to 500 miles above Earth. They traveled around Earth every 96 minutes. Tubsat-N, designated internationally as 1998-042A, weighed eighteen lbs. while Tubsat-N1, designated 1998-042B, weighed seven lbs. Technically, putting satellites in low Earth orbits is only a small step from de... |
time and previously had conducted sub-orbital test flights. The benefits of a submarine launch are safety and ease of putting a payload into a particular orbit. By comparison, there are safety restrictions on the directions toward which land-based rockets can be launched. On the other hand, these submarine-based missil... |
able to launch very large and heavy communications satellites or interplanetary space probes. However, the success of the Shitl launch could open up a valuable small-satellite niche in the space-launch market for the Russians. The Northern fleet reportedly was paid $111,000 for the launch, which helped the submarine cr... |
Mechanics Department plans to launch two more TUBSATs. Learn more about nuclear submarines and missiles... Taking Nuclear Weapons off Hair-Trigger Alert Scientific American, November 1997 Launchers from decommissioned missiles sold by Russia Encyclopedia Astronautica DLR German Aerospace Center Top of this page Swords ... |
In January 1992, a container ship near the International Date Line, headed to Tacoma, Washington from Hong Kong, lost 12 containers during severe storm conditions. One of these containers held a shipment of 29,000 bathtub toys. Ten months later, the first of these plastic toys began to wash up onto |
the coast of Alaska. Driven by the wind and ocean currents, these toys continue to wash ashore during the next several years and some even drifted into the Atlantic Ocean. The ultimate reason for the world's surface ocean currents is the sun. The heating of the earth by the sun |
has produced semi-permanent pressure centers near the surface. When wind blows over the ocean around these pressure centers, surface waves are generated by transferring some of the wind's energy, in the form of momentum, from the air to the water. This constant push on the surface of the ocean is |
the force that forms the surface currents. Learning Lesson: How it is Currently Done Around the world, there are some similarities in the currents. For example, along the west coasts of the continents, the currents flow toward the equator in both hemispheres. These are called cold currents as they bring |
cool water from the polar regions into the tropical regions. The cold current off the west coast of the United States is called the California Current. Likewise, the opposite is true as well. Along the east coasts of the continents, the currents flow from the equator toward the poles. There |
are called warm current as they bring the warm tropical water north. The Gulf Stream, off the southeast United States coast, is one of the strongest currents known anywhere in the world, with water speeds up to 3 mph (5 kph). These currents have a huge impact on the long-term |
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