fly2school

Aircraft often trigger lightning when flying through a heavily charged region of a cloud. In these instances, the lightning flash originates at the airplane and extends away in opposite directions. The Federal Aviation Administration estimates that commercial jet airliners in the US are struck by lightning once every 1,000 flight hours, or once each year, on average. Planes can even trigger lightning themselves by flying through ionized clouds The good news is that modern-day airplanes are designed to minimize the impact of suck strikes, protecting both the aircraft and its passengers. When a bolt of lightning strikes the exterior of an airplane, the electricity travels into the aluminum shell and out through another point on the aluminum. For safety reasons, planes hit by lightning mid-flight undergo inspection after landing but in most cases, the aircraft is either unharmed or sustains only minor damage. Lightning typically strikes a relatively sharp edge of a plane, like a wing...

The Power of a Rocket The propulsion of all rockets is explained by the same physical principle, which is Newton's third law of motion. Matter is forcefully ejected from a system, producing an equal and opposite reaction on what remains. The air goes one way and the balloon moves in the opposite direction. Rockets work in much the same way. Exhaust gases coming out of the engine nozzle at high speed push the rocket forward. A rocket has four main parts, nose cone, fins, rocket body, and engine. The nose cone carries the payload or cargo. Common payloads include astro- nauts, satellites, scientific instruments, and even explosives. The nose cone may also contain the guidance system that controls the flight direction of the rocket. Aerodynamic forces are generated and act on a rocket as it flies through the air. Forces are vector quantities having both a magnitude and a direction. The magnitude of the aerodynamic forces depends on the shape, size and velocity of the rocket and...

What is Cosmic Expansion? Cosmological Redshifts result from the expansion of space between us and a distant galaxy or quasar. Space is expanding everywhere, so the more distant an object is, the more rapidly it appears to be moving away. According to Hubble's Law. The dominant motion in the universe is the smooth expansion known as Hubble's Law. This is referred to as the "cosmic velocity dispersion" or "cosmic scatter" and is probably due to the fact that the gas clouds that formed the galaxies all had some small additional motion of their own. Dr. Wendy Freedman determined space to expand at 72 kilometers per second per megaparsec - roughly 3.3 million light years - meaning that for every 3.3 million light years further away from the earth you are, the matter where you are, is moving away from earth 72 kilometers a second faster. In a closed universe, gravity eventually stops the expansion of the universe, after which it starts to contract ...