HOME





Planetary Science Institute
The Planetary Science Institute (PSI) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit research institute based in Tucson, Arizona, focusing on planetary science. , its director is Dr. Mark V. Sykes. PSI, along with Space Science Institute (SSI) Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), and Eureka Scientific, were listed as 501(c)(3) organizations in the US in a special report by Nature in 2007, which facilitate federal grant applications of non-tenure-track astronomers. Description Founded in 1972 by William Kenneth Hartmann, PSI is involved in many NASA missions, the study of Mars, asteroids, comets, interplanetary dust, the formation of the Solar System, extrasolar planets, the origin of life, and other scientific topics. It actively participated in the ''Dawn'' mission, which explored Vesta between 2011 and 2012, and Ceres between 2015 and 2018. It managed the GRaND a Gamma Ray and Neutron Detector spectrometer, which mapped the surfaces of the two minor planets to determine how they were f ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Nonprofit Organization
A nonprofit organization (NPO), also known as a nonbusiness entity, nonprofit institution, not-for-profit organization, or simply a nonprofit, is a non-governmental (private) legal entity organized and operated for a collective, public, or social benefit, as opposed to an entity that operates as a business aiming to generate a Profit (accounting), profit for its owners. A nonprofit organization is subject to the non-distribution constraint: any revenues that exceed expenses must be committed to the organization's purpose, not taken by private parties. Depending on the local laws, charities are regularly organized as non-profits. A host of organizations may be non-profit, including some political organizations, schools, hospitals, business associations, churches, foundations, social clubs, and consumer cooperatives. Nonprofit entities may seek approval from governments to be Tax exemption, tax-exempt, and some may also qualify to receive tax-deductible contributions, but an enti ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Comet
A comet is an icy, small Solar System body that warms and begins to release gases when passing close to the Sun, a process called outgassing. This produces an extended, gravitationally unbound atmosphere or Coma (cometary), coma surrounding the nucleus, and sometimes a Comet tail, tail of gas and dust gas blown out from the coma. These phenomena are due to the effects of solar radiation and the outstreaming solar wind plasma acting upon the nucleus of the comet. Comet nuclei range from a few hundred meters to tens of kilometers across and are composed of loose collections of ice, dust, and small rocky particles. The coma may be up to 15 times Earth's diameter, while the tail may stretch beyond one astronomical unit. If sufficiently close and bright, a comet may be seen from Earth without the aid of a telescope and can Subtended angle, subtend an arc of up to 30° (60 Moons) across the sky. Comets have been observed and recorded since ancient times by many cultures and religion ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Science Book
Science is a systematic discipline that builds and organises knowledge in the form of testable hypotheses and predictions about the universe. Modern science is typically divided into twoor threemajor branches: the natural sciences, which study the physical world, and the social sciences, which study individuals and societies. While referred to as the formal sciences, the study of logic, mathematics, and theoretical computer science are typically regarded as separate because they rely on deductive reasoning instead of the scientific method as their main methodology. Meanwhile, applied sciences are disciplines that use scientific knowledge for practical purposes, such as engineering and medicine. The history of science spans the majority of the historical record, with the earliest identifiable predecessors to modern science dating to the Bronze Age in Egypt and Mesopotamia (). Their contributions to mathematics, astronomy, and medicine entered and shaped the Greek natural phi ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Science Education
Science education is the teaching and learning of science to school children, college students, or adults within the general public. The field of science education includes work in science content, science process (the scientific method), some social science, and some teaching pedagogy. The standards for science education provide expectations for the development of understanding for students through the entire course of their K–12 (education), K-12 education and beyond. The traditional subjects included in the standards are Physical science, physical, Life science, life, Earth science, earth, space science, space, and human sciences. Historical background The first person credited with being employed as a science teacher in a British public school (privately funded), public school was William Sharp (homeopath), William Sharp, who left the job at Rugby School in 1850 after establishing science to the curriculum. Sharp is said to have established a model for science to be taug ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Near-Earth Object
A near-Earth object (NEO) is any small Solar System body orbiting the Sun whose closest approach to the Sun ( perihelion) is less than 1.3 times the Earth–Sun distance (astronomical unit, AU). This definition applies to the object's orbit around the Sun, rather than its current position, thus an object with such an orbit is considered an NEO even at times when it is far from making a close approach of Earth. If an NEO's orbit crosses the Earth's orbit, and the object is larger than across, it is considered a potentially hazardous object (PHO). Most known PHOs and NEOs are asteroids, but about a third of a percent are comets. There are over 37,000 known near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) and over 120 known short-period near-Earth comets (NECs). A number of solar-orbiting meteoroids were large enough to be tracked in space before striking Earth. It is now widely accepted that collisions in the past have had a significant role in shaping the geological and biological history of Ea ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Distributed Computing
Distributed computing is a field of computer science that studies distributed systems, defined as computer systems whose inter-communicating components are located on different networked computers. The components of a distributed system communicate and coordinate their actions by passing messages to one another in order to achieve a common goal. Three significant challenges of distributed systems are: maintaining concurrency of components, overcoming the lack of a global clock, and managing the independent failure of components. When a component of one system fails, the entire system does not fail. Examples of distributed systems vary from SOA-based systems to microservices to massively multiplayer online games to peer-to-peer applications. Distributed systems cost significantly more than monolithic architectures, primarily due to increased needs for additional hardware, servers, gateways, firewalls, new subnets, proxies, and so on. Also, distributed systems are prone to ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Orbit@home
orbit@home was a BOINC-based volunteer computing project of the Planetary Science Institute. It uses the "Orbit Reconstruction, Simulation and Analysis" framework to optimize the search strategies that are used to find near-Earth objects. On March 4, 2008, orbit@home completed the installation of its new server and officially opened to new members. On April 11, orbit@home launched a Windows version of their client. On February 16, 2013, the project was halted due to lack of grant funding. However, on July 23, 2013, the Orbit@home project was selected for funding by NASA's Near Earth Object Observation program. It was announced that orbit@home is to resume operations sometime in 2014 or 2015. As of July 13, 2018, orbit@home is offline according to its website, and the upgrade announcement has been removed. See also *List of volunteer computing projects This is a comprehensive list of volunteer computing projects, which are a type of distributed computing where volunteers donat ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


GRaND
Grand may refer to: People with the name * Grand (surname) * Grand L. Bush (born 1955), American actor Places * Grand, Oklahoma, USA * Grand, Vosges, village and commune in France with Gallo-Roman amphitheatre * Grand County (other), several places * Grand Geyser, Upper Geyser Basin of Yellowstone, USA * Le Grand, California, USA; census-designated place * Mount Grand, Brockville, New Zealand Arts, entertainment, and media * ''Grand'' (Erin McKeown album), 2003 * "Grand" (Kane Brown song), 2022 * ''Grand'' (Matt and Kim album), 2009 * ''Grand'' (magazine), a lifestyle magazine related to related to grandparents * ''Grand'' (TV series), American sitcom, 1990 * Grand Production, Serbian record label company Other uses * Great Recycling and Northern Development Canal, also known as GRAND Canal * Grand (slang), one thousand units of currency * Giant Radio Array for Neutrino Detection, also known as GRAND See also * * * Grand Hotel (other) * Grand sta ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Ceres (dwarf Planet)
Ceres (minor-planet designation: 1 Ceres) is a dwarf planet in the middle main asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. It was the first known asteroid, discovered on 1 January 1801 by Giuseppe Piazzi at Palermo Astronomical Observatory in Sicily, and announced as a new planet. Ceres was later classified as an asteroid and then a dwarf planet, the only one not beyond Neptune's orbit. Ceres's diameter is about a quarter that of the Moon. Its small size means that even at its brightest it is too dim to be seen by the naked eye, except under extremely dark skies. Its apparent magnitude ranges from 6.7 to 9.3, peaking at opposition (planets), opposition (when it is closest to Earth) once every 15- to 16-month synodic period. As a result, its surface features are barely visible even with the most powerful telescopes, and little was known about it until the robotic NASA spacecraft Dawn (spacecraft), ''Dawn'' approached Ceres for its orbital mission in 2015. ''Dawn'' fo ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

4 Vesta
Vesta (minor-planet designation: 4 Vesta) is one of the largest objects in the asteroid belt, with a mean diameter of . It was discovered by the German astronomer Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers on 29 March 1807 and is named after Vesta (mythology), Vesta, the virgin goddess of home and hearth from Roman mythology. Vesta is thought to be the second-largest asteroid, both by mass and by volume, after the dwarf planet Ceres (dwarf planet), Ceres. Measurements give it a nominal volume only slightly larger than that of 2 Pallas, Pallas (about 5% greater), but it is 25% to 30% more massive. It constitutes an estimated 9% of the mass of the asteroid belt. Vesta is the only known remaining rocky protoplanet of the kind that formed the terrestrial planets. Numerous fragments of Vesta were ejected by collisions one and two billion years ago that left two enormous craters occupying much of Vesta's southern hemisphere. Debris from these events has fallen to Earth as HED meteorite, howardi ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Dawn (spacecraft)
''Dawn'' is a retired space probe that was launched by NASA in September 2007 with the mission of studying two of the three known protoplanets of the asteroid belt: Vesta and Ceres. In the fulfillment of that mission—the ninth in NASA's Discovery Program—''Dawn'' entered orbit around Vesta on July 16, 2011, and completed a 14-month survey mission before leaving for Ceres in late 2012. It entered orbit around Ceres on March 6, 2015. In 2017, NASA announced that the planned nine-year mission would be extended until the probe's hydrazine fuel supply was depleted. On November 1, 2018, NASA announced that ''Dawn'' had depleted its hydrazine, and the mission was ended. The derelict probe remains in a stable orbit around Ceres. ''Dawn'' is the first spacecraft to have orbited two extraterrestrial bodies, the first spacecraft to have visited either Vesta or Ceres, and the first to have orbited a dwarf planet. The ''Dawn'' mission was managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Origin Of Life
Abiogenesis is the natural process by which life arises from abiotic component, non-living matter, such as simple organic compounds. The prevailing scientific hypothesis is that the transition from non-living to organism, living entities on Earth was not a single event, but a process of increasing complexity involving the formation of a planetary habitability, habitable planet, the prebiotic synthesis of organic molecules, molecular self-replication, self-assembly, autocatalysis, and the emergence of cell membranes. The transition from non-life to life has never been observed experimentally, but many proposals have been made for different stages of the process. The study of abiogenesis aims to determine how pre-life chemical reactions gave rise to life under conditions strikingly different from those on Earth today. It primarily uses tools from biology and chemistry, with more recent approaches attempting a synthesis of many sciences. Life functions through the specialized ch ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]