Six graceful years

Two excellent rovers landed on Mars in January 2004. Opportunity(MER-B) Mars Exploration Rover - B, is one of them which landed on Mars on 25th January 2004 05:05 Ground UTC (circa 13:15 local time). The first rover Spirit(MER-A) landed on Mars three weeks before MER-B, on other side of Mars on 04:35 Ground UTC on January 4, 2004.

The original mission was planned for 90 sols(day on mars), but amazingly these excellent rovers have completed 6 glorious earth years. Today is the 6th earth anniversary of MER-B, yes the rover "Opportunity" is completing 6 earth years(2135 sols) on Mars. No doubt its a big achievement..

On this occasion, I would like to give my Regards and Congratulations to NASA for there tremendous creativity and initiatives.

References: http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.html; http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/missions/profile.cfm?MCode=MER_B; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_rover

The Longest Annular Solar Eclipse of this Millenium

Today is one of the unique day which occurs once in a millennium “The 15th January 2010”, and we are facing the longest solar eclipse of this millennium. This is an annular solar eclipse which occurs when apparent diameter of moon is smaller than SUN. For complete solar eclipse the apparent diameter of moon should be equal or greater than SUN so that moon can cover full SUN. Due to smaller diameter in annular eclipse moon only covers internal part of SUN and this makes the SUN to look like and annulus or ring and therefore, named as Annular Solar Eclipse.

Below diagram shows the condition of occurrence of annular solar eclipse.

Today’s is one of the longest eclipse with a length of 11 minutes and 8 seconds approx.

Few data regarding today’s eclipse that I got from NASA website:

Nature of eclipse : Annular

Duration : 11 minutes and 8 seconds approx.

Max stretch : 300 KM approx.

Magnitude : 0.9 approx.

Maximum eclipse : 07:07:39 UT

Start point : Central African Republic

Covered areas in sequence : Chad, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, Kenya, and Somalia, Indian ocean India, Srilanka, Bay of Bangal, Bangladesh, Burma (Myanmar).

End Point : Chinese Yellow Sea Coast

In India the annular eclipse is visible only in south Kerala and Tamil Nadu and Indian regions fall between North Limit of Eclipse to Central line of Eclipse with a variable visibility of 4 minutes to 10 minutes and 18 seconds.

References: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_eclipse_of_January_15,_2010 ; http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEsearch/SEsearch.php; http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEmono/ASE2010/ASE2010.html; http://www.hermit.org/Eclipse/2010-01-15/.