Dawn: 
To begin to be perceived 
A look at NASA's new venture

The latest probe sent into space by NASA is "Dawn." and this one is designed to take a closer look at the largest of the minor planets. and what are those mysterious bright spots.?

The Major and the Minor

The Earth has eight planets, but when I was a schoolboy people thought we had nine, Mercury Venus Earth Mars Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune and Pluto.

Pluto is now classed as a minor planet, so what just is "A minor planet?" A minor planet AKA planetoid "Can be dwarf planets, asteroids, trojans, centaurs, Kuiper belt objects, and other trans-Neptunian objects." We have tracked the orbits of 670,000 minor planets so far, the first one discovered was Ceres in 1801 and for some time, it was thought to be a planet like Pluto

Dwarf planets, asteroids, trojans and centaurs

Just to complicate matters, there are different groups of minor planets and they are named according to where they are positioned, we have e.g "Main-belt asteroids" or just "The Asteroid belt" this belt includes some of the larger ones, Ceres, Vesta, and Pallas, and Hygiea, there are among others Near-Earth asteroids, Aten asteroids, Apollo asteroids, and Distant minor planets

It has taken seven and a half years

Planets of the Solar System to scale. Jupiter and Saturn (top row), Uranus and Neptune (top middle), Earth and Venus (bottom middle), Mars and Mercury.

6 March 2015 Nasa launched a probe called "Dawn." seven and a half years ago, to investigate that largest of the minor planets "Ceres." and it has just gone into an orbit around the dwarf, two weeks ago Dawn discovered two mysterious bright spots.

Extremely surprising and puzzling

Nasa is very excited about them and has called them "Extremely surprising and puzzling." and speculate that might be water or salt deposits. In a months time, Dawn will begin taking close-up images and hope the mystery will be resolved

So you think the planets are big? just look at the size of a star (Our Sun)

Thomas Paine

Thomas Paine The man of the people

Picture it, we are in Philadelphia, the time is January 1776, George III is on the throne in England and there’s trouble in the colonies. 

Talk of revolutionary sentiment is rife, a young forty-year-old comparatively unknown Englishman going by the name of Thomas Paine has just written a pamphlet called “Common Sense” he published it anonymously because, and I quote:-

"As my wish was to serve an oppressed people, and assist in a just and good cause, I conceived that the honour of it would be promoted by my declining to make even the usual profits of an author”

A man of many talents from a woman's undergarments, tax man to a man of the cloth.

Whilst in England, Paine’s many professions included a master stay-maker, an excise officer, he even applied to become an ordained minister of the Church of England and a schoolteacher. Working as an excise officer he published, in the summer of 1772, “The Case of the Officers of

Excise”, a twenty-one-page article, his first political work.

Benjamin Franklin

While in London distributing his pamphlet he was sacked from his job “Being absent without leave” a friend introduced him to Benjamin Franklin, who suggested emigration to the British colonial America, Tom Paine was known as "a corsetmaker by trade, a journalist by profession, and a propagandist by inclination, immigrated to America from the sleepy town of Lewis in Sussex England arriving in Philadelphia on November 30, 1774.

Very much NOT a royalist

The pamphlet “Common Sense” was an instant best-seller, both in the colonies and in Europe, it was called “the most influential tract of the American Revolution” and because of this, Paine swiftly moved from that comparatively unknown Englishman into an international famous one, becoming one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. His work “Common Sense” quoted from James Thomson’s “Liberty”

"Man knows no master save creating Heaven,

Or those whom choice and common good ordain".

Another powerful quote encapsulates the gist perfectly.

Thomas Paine

“In England, a king hath little more to do than to make war and give away places; which in plain terms, is to impoverish the nation and set it together by the ears. A pretty business indeed for a man to be allowed eight hundred thousand sterling a year for and worshipped into the bargain! Of more worth is one honest man to society and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived.”

“The Age of Reason"

Plaque at the White Hart Hotel,Lewes, East Sussex, south east England

Thomas Paine went on to write “The Age of Reason; Being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology” this criticizes institutionalized religion and challenges the legitimacy of the Bible, 

Thomas Paine died on June 8, 1809, aged 72 in New York, NY, US. 

Spare Parts

Spare Parts  
The answer to keeping the body moving, A look at how nature is being replaced 

Our bodies are amazing and can last for a long time, but just like a car, it might need some spare parts now and again, after that the body could keep on going for ages.

Knee replacement

Knee Replacement

We humans sometimes end up with more than we started out with, what with wigs and false eyes replacement knees and hips, prosthetic legs, fingers, bionic hands and arms and hands, organ transplants such as hearts kidney and livers, we also have skin transplants .

It makes you wonder what part will be swapped with next, we have already had a face remade, maybe we could get a new brain? but maybe that is a bit like Frankenstein who knows

Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillator

Some people have false ears and false noses, doctors can fit artificial Pancreas and Bladders, I myself have four metal scaffold-like structures called stents, inserted into my aorta the main heart artery to keep it open to allow blood to flow in and out of my heart.

I also have a titanium knee fitted after I had my arthritic knee removed and also had a mini defibrillator fitted in my heart after being diagnosed with a life-threatening cardiac dysrhythmia

Helping the Heart

ICD

Some people have Skeletal Plates fitted to protect the brain. 

Lung and other organs of the body that can be replaced are the intestines, and thymus (Part of the body’s immune system) and of course we must not forget false teeth.

As hard as Carbon

One on the problems with false teeth (Dentures) is they occasionally chip or break and the can cost a lot to repair or replace, but the good news is that researchers have found the teeth of the limpet (A small aquatic snail) is the strongest biological material known to man and could be used to make false teeth in the future, the teeth of the limpet are so hard that they had to use a diamond saw to cut them

Could spare parts even make us stronger?

Superman

I don't think we will every get to the stage where we replace the complete body, but bionics today can do a lot more than we are seeing now

Who knows we may yet see a bionic man or even a Superman!

Galaxies space and the universe, a look beyond our world

The vastness of space is almost impossible for us to comprehend, this page is intended to take a wider look at our Galaxies and others.

The thoughts of an astronaut

Buzz Aldrin wrote after his walk on the moon on July 21, 1969

"There may be aliens in our Milky Way galaxy, and there are billions of other galaxies. The probability is almost certain that there is life somewhere in space."

Looking in from the edge

If it were possible to stand on the edge and look in at all the Galaxy's we would see one galaxy called the Milky Way

This contains our very own solar system, it is part of a Local Galactic Group that contains more than 54 galaxies and as well as our Milky Way (The second-largest galaxy) Is the largest galaxy Andromeda these two are the most massive galaxies by far in the Local Galactic Group
The giant in our group

Andromeda is massively bigger than the Milky Way and contains 1 trillion stars possible more; 5 times as many stars as the Milky Way.

Although it is approximately 2,500,000 light-years and that is a very long way away, just think if there was another form of life in andromeda it would take them over 2 million years to travel to Earth, but why anyone would come here I have not the faintest idea The Andromeda Galaxy is the nearest spiral galaxy to our own (The milky way). Remember a galaxy isn't an individual object, it’s a group of stars

Dwarfs and Giants

Of the two types of galaxies, we have the dwarf galaxies and the larger ones are called spiral which includes Andromeda, there are even larger galaxies, but we won’t go into that. Now for a bit of trivia that I am sure you would like to have tucked into your trivia box

Andromeda was named after Princess Andromeda, from Greek mythology, the poor Princess was punished for her mother's bragging, she was chained to a rock to be sacrificed to a sea monster

But don’t worry in the end she was saved by Perseus who later was to become her husband, and it is said, that this story was later converted to the legend of St. George and the Dragon, anyway enough of this fantasy story back to Andromeda.

.
Just look up and you will find

To find Andromeda, first find the constellation of Ursa Major (Great Bear) in England we call it the plough in the states it is called the big dipper.


Andromeda is the cloudy mass close nearby, there was even a film made in honour of Andromeda called the Andromeda Strain it is about a satellite returning to Earth containing a virus, killing a complete village, but just like The Greek Prince it had a happy ending

MARS the God of war

The Greek and Roman God of war were Ares and both civilizations named Mars the red planet after him, the planet is also known as the red one and the fire star.

The Red Planet

 Mars has always been looked upon as a planet with legions of war-like creatures ready to invade Earth at ant time. Man even have a name for these native inhabitants of the planet Mars, since 1877 the name "Martians" has been used, even today with our scientific knowledge of the planet there are still many who believe that flying saucers filled to the brim with little green Martians are ready to take over this planet of ours at any time.

H.G. Wells

H.G.Wells that prolific English writer wrote in 1898 a science fiction novel "The War of he Worlds." his words "Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us." Can still send a shiver through your veins as you read his book.

The radio program that started a panic 

In 1938, the story was broadcast on the radio as part of The Mercury Theatre on the Air on the Columbia Broadcasting System radio network as a Halloween episode it was narrated and directed by Orson Welles The first 40 minutes of the broadcast was in the form of a news bulletin and led to panic by some listeners who believed the program was real

The two sons of the God of war

Mars has two moons and even those have scary connotations, Phobos (panic/fear) and Deimos (terror/dread), in Greek mythology, they were the sons of Ares, and always followed him into battle Their Mother was Aphrodite and she and Ares gave birth to the gods Eros, Anteros, Phobos, Deimos, Harmonia, and Adrestia.

Just like Earth, well almost 

Mars like the Earth has polar ice caps, that means there is water on Mars, it also has volcanoes, valleys, and deserts and although it has only a thin atmosphere man have always looked at it as the possible next planet to colonized. The Martian day is about the same as an Earth day, as is a day, it has seasons like the Earth but they last nearly twice as long, nice in the summer but wow that winter. A big bonus is you would only be half your age because a year on Mars is almost twice as long as on Earth Would you like to go there? A one-way trip to the red planet has already been organized by a Dutch group and so far there have been 200,000 applicants for the Mars One mission. if you fancy being one of these this is where you can sign up.