India’s prestigious unmanned moon mission Chandrayaan is called off due to the communication loss with the satellite, here on satrurday (Aug’29), said ISRO’s chief Mr. Madhavan Nair.

He also said the though he and his team of scientists are disappointed, ISRO has managed to salvage large volume of data and that can be attributed as a 95 % success of the mission, with 70000 images of the moon collected from the orbit 200 kms above the lunar surface.

The deep space network (DSN) lost contact at about 0130 hrs (IST) on saturday confirming the fears of losing the spacecraft once for all after the attitude determining star sensors failed in July.The Spacecraft had to resort to a less accurate gyroscope to do the job of star sensors. This was a clear sign that mission’s days are outnumbered, analysts say.

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Recently when I stumbled upon our ISRO’s website I was taken aback by the new web design. I have been loathing for long about the quality of ISRO’s site and its charmless appearance when compared to even the website or Iranian Space Agency. ISRO has struck a good chord with its revamped design and layout of it website to give more user friendly look and feel. But I personally feel it could have been even more better. I guess the new site is promoted from this independence day - Aug 15th.

This post is not exactly about the look and feel of ISRO’s  site but the new postulates that ISRO had promoted in as its vision and mission statement for the year 2025.

Please read below for India’s Space Vision ‘ 2025

1. Satellite based communication and navigation systems for rural connectivity, security needs and mobile services
2. Enhanced imaging capability for natural resource management, weather and climate change studies
3. Space science missions for better understanding of solar system and universe
4. Planetary exploration
5. Development of Heavy lift launcher
6. Reusable Launch Vehicles - Technology demonstrator missions leading to Two Stage To Orbit (TSTO)
7. Human Space Flight

Am important point to note hear is the last and said as the least priority given above - the Human Space Flight. Yes, when India’s Space science visionary Dr.Vikram Sarabhai set up ISRO he envisaged that our country is poor and we should not try to waste money in lavish researches like exploring mars, putting humans to space, etc. Our priority is to use the technology in right spirit and therefore people’s money should be used carefully. He believed Space science in India through ISRO should benefit the common man. All this was before 50 years ! And yes we achieved the same. We have the largest fleet of Remote sensing satellites that helps in solving humanitarian problems right from disaster prevention to crop yield in the paddy fields !!

Now that India has supposedly become a better country in terms of GDP growth and faster growing economy in the world, we can afford to experiment our technology in the vistas that we have not been before - like Human Space flight, Moon mission Chandrayaan, etc. Lets all be proud and be happy for what we have achieved all these years ! Lets salute those thousands of brains behind every success in India’s Space missions !

When I stumbled on to Google today, I could find it sporting a designer logo as it does on occasions.  This time around it was difficult to guess from the logo without mouse over on it !

This year has been marked for many scientific anniversaries -  200 years since Charles Darwin’s birth and 150 years since the publication of ‘On the Origin of Species’, and I had to give up my guessing and click on the logo to know that it was for the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s telescope !!

Gosh, what a persona Galileo was ! as an Italian professor of physics he demonstrated a simple contraption of two lenses at the two ends of a leather tube to the Italian senate exactly 400 years ago - which has now revolutioned the birth of Astronomy and Planetary sciences ! Galileo and Kepler were the two pillars responsible for this feat to happen. NASA’s recently launched Space telescope was named Kepler ! Hope Kepler makes some ground breaking discoveries and Lets remember these greats on this occasion !

There are only a few directors who make movies with prolific technology in their kitty. James cameroon is altogether in a different league of directors who always create a demand for the technology for his story; Be it his all time world over boxoffice hit - Terminator series or the invincible love story ‘Titanic’, Cameroon has been a very keen techno-geek in a director’s ward. His skill in thinking a futuristic story is very evident in his movies like Terminator (1984) and Aliens (1986).The way he handles the characters with the storyline is mesmerising.

Well, Avatar is the latest buzz in hollywood which has got the hype of its own kind that no one have imagined. This $ 200 million  movie’s trailer released in Apple.com has thrashed previous record of 1.7 million streams by a big margin of 2 million streams !!!

This movie is the brainchild of James Cameroon that was conceived and penned down about 14 years ago but had to wait a long time for want of relevant technology that was not adequate at that time.

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Ever wondered what those shooting stars that light up the night sky like a short lived splinter are ? Well, there have been many legends on them but the plain truth is that they are nothing but interplanetary dust and particles or left over debris of a passing Comet which on entering into the earth’s atmosphere attracted by earth’s gravity ultimately burn up to light up our skies.

While 90% of them burn up completely in the earth’s atmosphere itself, some sizeable meteors do reach up earth’s surface, which are called meteorites.

Tonight, we are expecting meteor showers termed as ‘Perseids‘ - which has been known to mankind for about 2000 years ! The Perseids are so-called because the point they appear to come from, called the radiant, lies in the constellation Perseus. The stream of debris is called the Perseid cloud and stretches along the orbit of the comet Swift-Tuttlethe major contributor for these showers is a popular comet called ‘Swift Tuttle‘.

Watch this below video from National Geographic about Perseids:

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Exoplanet orbiting close to its sun. Image credit: NASA

Launched into space on march 6, 2009 - the world’s most powerful orbiting telescope has shown its muscle power in detecting alien planets even before the actual calibrations for beginning actual mission is completed.

As per NASA’s statement made on Aug 6, Kepler has “detected the atmosphere of a known giant gas planet, demonstrating the telescope’s extraordinary scientific capabilities”

The discovery would be published in the Journal Science, this weekend. Kepler’s highly sophisticated precision instruments helped in this finding and has stirred the hype of the scientific community of the promises that Kepler made before launch : to find alien earths sooner.

What this finding demonstrates is the capability of Kepler like a tip of an iceberg - The Planet Hunting is just on ! Lets hope that the grand entrance made by the invincible Planet hunter - Kepler makes some astonishing discoveries asap !

Eclipse photo by David Cornfield, a member of the MIT cruise ship tour group, shows the "diamond ring" effect as the sun emerges from totality. Photo / David Cornfield

Two MIT Alumni Association groups led by MIT professors were rewarded with clear skies for the total eclipse of the sun on July 22, possibly the most-watched eclipse in history.

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