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Company Name: harvard.edu

Company Type: university

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This image of Mars was captured in visible light by NASA's Mars Global Surveyor. You can explore the Martian surface as these ways: - hold down your left mouse button, and drag it around the orb to view it from any angle. - hold down your right mouse button, then drag the mouse down, over the orb to enlarge it or up to make it smaller. - hold down both buttons and drag the orb around the sky. The white area on top is the north polar cap. Look at how much smaller the south polar cap is! To produce this animation, a cylindrical projection image of Mars was laid over a sphere using 3D Studio Max. The image was then exported to Cult3d, where the interactivity was added.

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Electromagnetic radiation transfers energy from one place to another, even through the vacuum of empty space. It is self-perpetuating, like a perfect pendulum, that swings back and forth forever. And just like two puppies playing tug of war with a toy, repeatedly pulling on it at the same time, because each senses the pull from the other, the electric and magnetic fields oscillate. When the electric field gets stronger, the magnetic field instantly strengthens too, and when the electric field weakens, so does the magnetic field. Get the picture? With EMR, there is motion too, as light travels in a straight line, away from the source. The red and blue wave animation below helps us to understand this. Do realize though, that these are fields of energy and magnetism. Once a light wave is created from some source, it travels on forever, until it is either absorbed by some gases it meets, or is reflected off some atoms or molecules. Now, in your mind, picture the most beautiful rainbow you have ever seen. Maybe you were lucky and saw a double one! You may already know that the colors of the rainbow are caused by water droplets acting like prisms, splitting sunlight into its component colors. The picture below shows how we can separate a beam of white light into a rainbow of these basic colors by passing it through a prism. In principle, the original beam of white light could be produced once again by passing the entire red-to-violet range of colors—called a spectrum (plural, spectra)—through a second prism to recombine the colored beams. This experiment was first reported by Isaac Newton over 300 years ago. The refraction index of any material is the property that causes light to bend when the light hits its surface at any angle, other than perpendicular. This index depends upon the wavelength of the light. This fact can be used to resolve the light beam into the spectral components it consists of. One of the tools used for spectrum analysis of light is the glass prism.