Saturday, February 27, 2010

The power of a glance.....

The power of a glance... It is in this way that love begins, and in this way only... Nothing is more real than these great shocks which two souls give each other in exchanging this spark." Victor Hugo

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Love........

"You know when you listen to music playing from another room? And you're singing along because it's a tune that you really love? When a door closes or a train passes by so you can't hear the music anymore, but you sing along anyway...then, no matter how much time passes, when you hear the music again, you're still in the exact same time with it. That's what love is like."

Truly...

"Truly loving another means letting go of all expectations. It means full acceptance, even celebration of another's personhood."

Love is .......

"Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own". "* "Alternate version; Love: the condition in which the welfare and happiness of another becomes essential to your own.

'Tuned' images from Esa's Smos water mission

By Jonathan Amos


Science correspondent, BBC News







Smos produces a snapshot every every 1.2 seconds

The first fully calibrated images from the European Space Agency's Smos satellite have now been released.
The spacecraft's new pictures show swathes of Scandinavia, Australia and the Amazon.
The maps record the amount of moisture held in soils and of the quantity of salts dissolved in seawater.
The mission's data is expected to have wide uses but should improve weather forecasts and warnings of extreme events, such as floods.
Smos was launched on 2 November. It carries a single instrument - an interferometric radiometer called Miras. Some eight metres across, it has the look of helicopter rotor blades.
Miras measures changes in the wetness of the land and in the salinity of ocean water by observing variations in the natural microwave emission coming up off the surface of the planet.





The mission will run for three years in the first instance
To do this, the instrument has 69 antennas positioned on a central structure and along the lengths of its three arms.
The signals received by the different antennas are combined to produce a single image.
This interferometric technique has been borrowed from radio astronomy, and has allowed Miras to mimic a much larger single antenna than could have been launched into space on Smos's rocket.
The instrument produces a snapshot of temperature brightness every 1.2 seconds. The image of Scandinavia shows one snapshot acquired by Smos.
Generally speaking, the "colder" (blue) the "temperature brightness" of the microwave signal, the saltier the water and the wetter the soil. Ocean water naturally shows up as very blue.


The raw images (L) from Smos have to be calibrated (R)





One key problem scientists have been grappling with is interference. Although the L-band (21cm) spectrum in which Smos operates is supposed to be protected, the team has discovered many spurious signals, particularly over China, western Russia and parts of Europe.





The Amazon: Smos will see seasonal changes in soil moisture

This has required the team to tune its reconstruction algorithm in order to clean up the images. It is just one of a number of calibration exercises that have to be undertaken to give the scientific community usable data.



Smos information will result in a better understanding of the hydrological cycle - the description of how water is constantly exchanged between the Earth's land and ocean surfaces and the atmosphere.



The satellite is expected to help improve short and medium-term weather forecasts, and also have practical applications in areas such as agriculture and water resource management.





Cryosat-2 will be launched in the next few weeks

In addition, climate models should benefit from having a more precise picture of the scale and speed of movement of water in the different components of the hydrological cycle.



The satellite is part of Esa's Earth Explorer programme - eight spacecraft that will acquire data on issues of pressing environmental concern.



The first - a gravity satellite called Goce - launched in early 2009. The third in the series is called Cryosat-2 and will launch in the coming weeks.



It will assess the state of the world's ice cover.

Where to find the rest.......

We find rest in those we love, and we provide a resting place in ourselves for those who love us."