1277 words free sample essay on Ozone Layer Depletions

Ozone is a colorless gas found in the upper atmosphere of the Earth. It is formed by the action of ultraviolet radiation on oxygen. Ozone forms a layer in the stratosphere, which projects life on Earth from the harmful effects of ultraviolet radiation. The depletion of ozone layer in the Earth’s upper atmosphere may cause severe environmental and health problems.

Ozone is formed when oxygen molecules absorb ultraviolet photons and undergo a chemical reaction known as photo dissociation or photolysis, where a single molecule of oxygen breaks down to two oxygen atoms. The free oxygen atom, then combines with an oxygen safer, and smarter products for the home, for communications, for medicine, for transportation, for agriculture, and for industry in general.

A key understanding of nanotechnology is that it offers not just better products, but a vastly improved manufacturing process. A computer can make copies of data files—essentially as many copies as you want at little or no cost. It may be only a matter of time until the building of products becomes as cheap as the copying of files. That is why it is sometimes seen as ‘the next industrial revolution’.

Like electricity or computers before it, nanotech will offer greatly improved efficiency in almost every facet of life. However, its technology will have dual-use, meaning it will have both commercial uses and military uses making far more powerful weapons and tools of surveillance. Thus it represents not only wonderful benefits for humanity, but also grave risks.

The power of nanotechnology can be encapsulated in an apparently simple device called a personal manufactory (PN) that may sit on your desktop. Packed with miniature chemical processors, computing, and robotics, it will produce a wide-range of items quickly, cleanly, and inexpensively, building products directly from blueprints. Thus, nanotechnology will not only allow making many high-quality products at very low cost, but it will allow making new manufactories at the same low cost and at the same rapid speed.

It is due to this unique ability to reproduce its own means of production that nanotech is said to be an ‘exponential’ technology. It represents a manufacturing system that will be able to make more manufacturing systems factories that can build factories rapidly, cheaply, and cleanly. The means of production will be able to reproduce exponentially, so in just a few weeks a few manufactories conceivably could become billions. It is a revolutionary, transformative, powerful, and potentially both very dangerous and beneficial technology.

Due to the rapid progress being made in enabling technologies, such as optics, nanolithography, mechano chemistry and 3D prototyping, full- scale nanotechnology may arrive much sooner than estimated. And if it does arrive that soon, the world may not be adequately prepared, and the consequences could be severe. Actually, it is time to ask some tough questions like who will own the technology, will it be heavily restricted or freely available, will it magnify or decrease the gap between rich and poor, can its use for destructive purposes be prevented, etc.

Some of the things which future personal manufactories could possibly produce are lifesaving medical robots, untraceable weapons of mass destruction, networked computers for everyone in the world, ability to construct items ‘from the bottom up’, using techniques and tools being developed today to make complete, high performance products. The word ‘nanotechnology’ was popularized by K. Eric Drexler in the 1980’s while talking about building machines on the scale of molecules, a few nanometers wide motors, robot arms, and even whole computers, far smaller than a cell.

Drexler spent the next ten years describing and analyzing these incredible devices, and responding to accusations of science fiction. Meanwhile, mundane technology was developing the ability to build simple structures on a molecular scale. As nanotechnology became an accepted concept, the meaning of the word shifted to encompass the simpler kinds of nanometer-scale technology. The U.S. National Nanotechnology Initiative defines it as anything smaller than 100 nanometers with novel properties.

Based on Nobel Prize (Physics) winner Richard Feynman’s vision of miniature factories using Nano machines to build complex products, advanced nanotechnology (sometimes referred to as molecular manufacturing) will make use of positionally-controlled mechanochemistry guided by molecular machine systems. Shortly after this envisioned molecular machinery is created, it will result in a manufacturing revolution, probably causing severe disruption. It also has serious economic, social, environmental, and military implications.

The nanotechnology development can be described in four phases. The first phase was of passive nanostructures where materials were designed to perform one task. The second phase introduces active nanostructures for multitasking; for example, actuators, drug delivery devices, and sensors. The third ‘phase, which we are just entering, will feature Nano systems with thousands of interacting components.

A few years after that, the first integrated Nano systems, functioning much like a mammalian cell with hierarchical systems within systems, are expected to be developed. Thus, as work progresses through the four phases of nanotechnology leading up to molecular Nano systems, which will include molecular manufacturing, it will become increasingly obvious that nanotech is ‘engineering of functional systems at the molecular scale’.

As used today, the term nanotechnology usually refers to a broad collection of mostly disconnected fields. Essentially, anything sufficiently small and interesting can be called nanotechnology. Much of it is harmless. For the rest, much of the harm is of familiar and limited quality. However, molecular manufacturing or MM is expected to bring unfamiliar risks and new classes of problems.

In its advanced form, Nanotechnology will have significant impact on almost all industries and all areas of society. It will offer better built, longer lasting, cleaner, and flotation, besides acquisition of basic technology for reusable launch vehicles. It was launched into a 635 km polar SSO in January 2007 as a co-passenger with CARTOSAT-2 and stayed in orbit for 10 days during which its pay loads performed the operations. After completion of the experiments, the SRE capsule was de-boosted and recovered successfully back on earth on 22nd January 2007.

INSAT-4B Spacecraft, the second in the INSAT-4 series of spacecraft’s, configured with exclusive communication pay loads to provide services in Ku and C frequency bands was co-located with INSAT-3A at 93.5 deg East longitude on March 12, 2007. The satellite has a life span of twelve years.

CARTOSAT-2 A, the thirteenth satellite in the IRS series, was launched on April 28, 2008 with a mission life of five years. It is a sophisticated and rugged remote sensing satellite that can provide scene specific spot imagery. This satellite carries a Panchromatic Camera (PAN) with a spatial resolution that is better than lm and swath of 9.6 km. Imageries from this satellite are used for cartographic applications like mapping, urban and rural infrastructure development and management, as well as application in Land Information (LIS) and GIS.

Ocean sat-2 satellite, which derives its heritage from previous IRS missions, was launched by PSLV-C14 from Satish Dhawan Space Centre, Sriharikota on Sept. 23, 2009. It carried three payloads Ocean Colour Monitor (OCM), Ku-band Pencil Beam scatter meter (SCAT) developed by ISRO, and Radio Occultation Sounder for Atmosphere (ROSA) developed by the Italian Space Agency. The satellite with a life of five years is envisaged to provide continuity of operational services of Ocean sat-l(IRS-P4) with enhanced application potential.

Along with Ocean sat-2, two more satellites RISAT-2 and ANUSAT were also launched. RISAT-2 is a Radar Imaging Satellite with all weather capability to take images of the earth. This Satellite will enhance ISRO’s capability for Disaster Management applications. ANUSAT (Anna University Satellite) is the first satellite built by an Indian University under the overall guidance of ISRO and will demonstrate the technologies related to message store and forward operations.