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Image: Rosetta's ever-changing view of a comet

These 210 images reflect Rosetta's ever-changing view of Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko between July 2014 and September 2016.

37 minutes ago in Space Exploration

Crash scene investigation reveals resting place of SMART-1 impact

Observations of the moon have revealed the final resting place of the European Space Agency's first lunar mission, SMART-1. The spacecraft was sent into a controlled impact with the lunar surface 11 years ago. Although an ...

1 hour ago in Space Exploration

Unravelling the mechanisms of SST warming in the Yellow Sea and East China Sea is still a challenge

The world's oceans are warming, and the marginal seas exhibit more notable warming than the open ocean due to their proximity to land and other unique regional factors. The Yellow Sea and East China Sea (YECS, Fig. 1) are ...

2 hours ago in Earth Sciences

Surface

In mathematics, specifically in topology, a surface is a two-dimensional topological manifold. The most familiar examples are those that arise as the boundaries of solid objects in ordinary three-dimensional Euclidean space R3 — for example, the surface of a ball or bagel. On the other hand, there are surfaces which cannot be embedded in three-dimensional Euclidean space without introducing singularities or intersecting itself — these are the unorientable surfaces.

To say that a surface is "two-dimensional" means that, about each point, there is a coordinate patch on which a two-dimensional coordinate system is defined. For example, the surface of the Earth is (ideally) a two-dimensional sphere, and latitude and longitude provide coordinates on it — except at the International Date Line and the poles, where longitude is undefined. This example illustrates that not all surfaces admits a single coordinate patch. In general, multiple coordinate patches are needed to cover a surface.

Surfaces find application in physics, engineering, computer graphics, and many other disciplines, primarily when they represent the surfaces of physical objects. For example, in analyzing the aerodynamic properties of an airplane, the central consideration is the flow of air along its surface.

This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA

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