Parallel Spirals

ISRO Annual Report - Space Access component

2011-04-09T02:48:00.000+05:30

ISRO has posted the 2010 Annual Report on its website. We now take a look at the space access component of this report which is titled, "Space Transportation". The Prime Minister in his speech on March 26, 2011 at the Space Applications Center urged ISRO to reduce cost of access to space and to pay attention to the GSLV. The Report makes no particular mention of these objectives but are in line with ISRO's overall continuing development strategy.

PSLV

The report seems to indicate that 2011 will see only two flights of the PSLV. These are the PSLV-C16 carrying Resourcesat-2, YOUTHSAT and XSat-1 and PSLV-C17 carrying GSAT-12. These are currently said to be in "preparatory stages".

GSLV Mk-I and Mk-II

This is what the Prime Minister has asked ISRO to pay attention to. The Report repeats that a series of ground tests will be done before flight testing the indigenous cryogenic upper stage in 2012. The report still keeps all the reports expected to have submitted in February 2011 as "expected". The GSLV programme review is still on and the report related to this is "expected" as well.

GSLV Mk-III

ISRO has been building up towards the development of this Medium Lift Vehicle capable of delivering 5 tons to GTO. This is the component of the GSLV Programme that is seeing good development. Last year saw the successful testing of the solid and liquid stages of this vehicle. The development and testing of the cryogenic stage is in progress and also the flight test in 2012 will be crucial for all future projects.

Human Spaceflight Programme

The wording in the Report seems to point to the fact that ISRO has decided on a course to take on the Human Spaceflight Programme. Buzz was that the ISRO was debating between the single shot approval and incremental steps approval methodologies. It seems ISRO has selected the incremental steps approval methodologies. This puts SRE-2 in line for launch in 2012-13 to "realise a recoverable capsule with Carbon-Carbon nose cap and to provide a platform to conduct microgravity experiments". These technologies are expected to be built into the Crew Vehicle. On the way forward, the report says:

The programme is proposed to be implemented in defined phases, with the first phase concentrating on design, development and performance demonstration of critical technologies leading to human spaceflight. Systems developed during this phase are to be utilised for unmanned flights in PSLV.

Testing these systems on PSLV is the best thing to do since this is India's most reliable launch platform.

Advanced Technology Vehicles and Sounding Rockets

This is where the most interesting space access technology testing is happening today. The development and testing of the Advanced Technology Vehicle (ATV) in March last year paves the way for a platform to test air breathing engine technologies. ISRO aims to use the platform to test the active scramjet engine, ramjet engine and finally the Dual Mode Ramjet (DMRJ) which would take Indian vehicles to speeds close to 10 times the speed of sound (or Mach 10). Commenting on possible applications of the ATV, the report says:

Advanced Technology Vehicle has the unique capability to take a payload of 200-400 kg up to an altitude of 800 km. Ascent of the vehicle in a direct vertical profile makes it an excellent platform for space research, best suited for the studies of upper atmospheric features and short period transient phenomena / events in the atmosphere. ATV also provides a cost-effective platform for the study of microgravity conditions with up to 10 minutes of microgravity at levels better than 100 g which can be used for microgravity experiments in fluid physics, combustion research, materials sciences, biology as well as to perform precursor experiments for launch vehicles, satellites and manned missions.

The lack of comment on the sounding rocket programme is of concern.

Reusable Launch Vehicle Technology Demonstration (RLV-TD)

This project also seems to be progressing smoothly. This is the first stage of Indian efforts to make a Single Stage to Orbit (SSTO) vehicle. The report says:

During the year, all design options were finalised with titanium elevon, composite movable fin and metallic wing leading edge. Mission design has been completed with revised vehicle mass. All design related issues have been addressed and presented to the National Review Committee and clearance obtained to go ahead.

This is of-course for the Hypersonic flight experiment (HEX).

There are also improvements on the ground facilities at the Sriharikota High Altitude Range (SHAR). It is interesting to note that the commissioning trials for the new Mission Control Center are progressing along with efforts to improve launch support for 5 to 6 launches per year.

ISRO's single person multiple post situation

2011-04-07T23:01:00.000+05:30

The Parliamentary Estimates Committee asked ISRO Chairman Dr K Radhakrishnan whether it was legal for him to be holding 4 positions - Chairman, ISRO; Chairman, Space Comission; Secretary, Department of Space and Chairman, Antrix Corporation. It seems to be legal since every Chairman since Vikram Sarabhai has held these posts since the 1960s.

The question raises an interesting point. This may be a special arrangement done for high technology departments in the 1960s like the nuclear Department of Atomic Energy to enable easy and quick decision making and also enable smoother functioning. It remains to be seen if this has been misused.

This 'concentration of power' has never seemingly been questioned before. The mixture of the failure of GSLV and the Antrix-DEVAS deal seems to have brought this question to the fore.

This multiplicity of posts may have been created to satisfy Government requirements. However, having one person in charge may cause problems related to transparency, accountability and decision making.

What to do between work - scientific travel writing?

2011-04-06T04:39:00.000+05:30

For quite some time now, I have been thinking about what to do generally between work. The thought of travelling did strike me as a useful thing to do. While I have not arrived at any useful direction on what to do for work, I have come to an idea on what to do between work or to take a break from work.

The idea is an extension on my "Telescopes of India" tour, which did not really work out so well. The idea is to travel to a country which has an astronomical observatory. What I would do next is not really very clear to me now. But, I think I'll figure things out as I learn more and more about the observatory itself. I don't know if there's a genre called "scientific travel writing" but it would be an interesting genre to begin writing in.

There are many people interested in visiting scientific places - like observatories and laboratories. It'll be interesting to see how an ordinary guy is given entrance to these facilities. This will be in addition to living with a scientist and learning about the "scientific culture" of the organisation. I think that's how I would define scientific travel writing.

This is really the first draft of this idea but it sounds like an interesting concept for me to try and explore in the future. Since, I have been following the space and astronomy community, this is where I hope to begin probing. It's a huge experiment.

First report on Space Tourism in India

2011-04-05T22:14:00.000+05:30

Clark Lindsey posted on his RLV and Space Transport blog yesterday about this first report on space tourism in India. The report is brought out by the University of Petroleum and Energy Studies (UPES) and McGill University. I had a cursory glance through this report and given below are my thoughts about this report.

The Report is done by a University (UPES) which you would not equate with space. It is done by the Center for Aviation Studies and released by a Secretary in the Civil Aviation Ministry. Again, not really showing involvement from anyone in the space business in India today. This makes it a tad difficult to understand their background with relation to this subject.

The Report itself is in an interesting format. It puts out the condition in the US and compares the same with the Indian situation and draws unfortunate parallels. For example, it talks about building spaceports merely by extending airports. It even talks about DGCA playing a role similar to what the FAA does in the USA.

The Report is perhaps a first that is publicly released and perhaps lays the foundation for in-depth topic specific reports on various aspects of space tourism. There have been interesting suggestions for space tourism vehicles based out of India - as an example Earth2Orbit's Sushmita Mohanty suggested developing the Space ReEntry Experiment vehicle(SRE) as a space tourism vehicle out of India. Such bold suggestions were not studied or considered during the course of this report. It also depended rather heavily on the US scenario and did not envisage anything from the Indian perspective which could have made it a more worthwhile report rather than trying to make it an Indian copy of a US model.

India has many interesting alternatives. Entrepreneurial companies like Team Indus and Earth2Orbit are sprouting in India which could develop and improve SREs or even totally new ventures developing rockets and crafts that could handle the technology aspect. A Space Transportation Authority could be setup coming out of the current Launch Authorisation Board from within ISRO. There is already an Indian expecting to fly in SpaceShipTwo.

All in all, I think that the report is an important first step which was not bold enough and forward thinking enough but which I hope pushes many more studies and public interest in the idea of space tourism.

First report on Space Tourism in India

2011-04-05T18:35:00.000+05:30

Clark Lindsey posted on his RLV and Space Transport bl

Trek to Korlai Fort

2011-03-14T23:44:00.000+05:30

In January, I finally got my membership for the Youth Hostels Association of India for two years. I was looking out for a way to utilise the membership but no opportunity presented itself till March 6, 2011 when the Mumbai unit went on a trek to Korlai Fort. It has been a long time since I went trekking and I did not want to do a trek labelled "hard" by the trekkers themselves. I therefore chose a "medium" trek.

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I learnt from Ganesh that they were travelling by ST bus and that I could come along. I immediately flagged it to Pranav's attention. After a few rounds of conversation, I decided to head down to Parel ST Bus Depot while Pranav decided to catch up with us at Korlai on the next day. I packed a bag that was just heavy and was filled with stuff I never would have used. I packed a 1.5 liter water bottle and managed to alternately over-hydrate and under-hydrate myself. Well, I am happy that it was a simple enough trek so I didn't have to think about too many things at the same time. There also seemed to be a malfunction in my camera's battery indicator which showed that the battery was full when it was really drained. I read up about Korlai Fort on Wikipedia and found out that the article on Korlai itself was speedily deleted by someone.

Dad insisted on dropping me at Parel ST Stand which is very oddly situated. It was because I informed the YHAI guys only on the previous day that I had to travel there. Else, I could think about joining them at Chembur. The ST depots in Maharashtra are not as good as the ones in Kerala or Tamil Nadu but are much better than my last experience of them. The buses were more of a surprise for me. The travel was particularily smooth and the journey was particularly pleasant. We had wada pav at Alibaug and then proceeded to Revdanda and then crossed the river to Korlai reaching the bus stop at 10:30 in the morning. We then walked through the small village of Korlai as we headed towards the hill on which the fort was built.

We pre-ordered lunch at a small hotel before the climb and then walked through open pans were fish were left to dry and walked up a tar path to the base of the hill. We then rested a bit at the bottom and then walked up the road that went along a side of the fort. The road had a small beach to one side and the hill slope on the other. Ahead we saw the Korlai Fort Lighthouse. A manager at the gate offered a paid tour of the interior of the lighthouse. We had to pay extra to take pictures. I thought it wise to conserve battery (and by now I got the hang of Pranav's insatiable desire for getting himself photographed). I like the sceneries a bit more. Hence, I passed by the offer and went to take a look inside the light house.

The manager explained that the lighthouse was automated and it pretty much took care of itself. The workers on site were mostly there to do maintenance work and to check the instrumentation once or twice a day. We passed through two narrow holes in the ceiling to reach the top of the light house. The manager explained how the lighthouse worked, how it was now mostly used by fishermen more than anyone else and the presence of modern technology stuff like transmitters and satellite dishes that one really did not see in a lighthouse. The structure did not need to be big because of the kind of boats it helped. It helped fishermen go deeper into the sea and get better and a variety of catch. There were even solar panels that charged the battery during the day for when there would be power cuts.

We left the manager and climbed a steep set of steps to the fort. I took quite a few number of breaks in between. Learnt that pacing yourself isn't as easy as saying, "You have to pace yourself." After walking around the fort, we left out through the other gate. I also felt the afternoon high sun taking a toll on me and then had a hard time getting to the base of the hill. We steadily went down one of the wings of the fortress that touched the sea and then had a round of introductions and took group photos. We then went to the side in through a nice tunnel with a pleasant breeze and sat for a while. We began the slow ascent, a walk through the main corridor and reached the main fort area.

We'd heard of a water source that was fresh inside of the fortress and we were interested in tasting some. We also had group members discuss the history of the fort and we had a nice time chatting about the forts of the Siddis known to have resided in the area of Alibaug during the reign of Shivaji and Sambhaji. We saw a temple and a broken down church and signs of the restoration work that was being carried out by Archaeological Survey of India. There were many cement packs in the fort and we joked that these were uncovered along with the rest of the fort. The water in that natural tank was quite good and very refreshing after that long ascent.

We had lunch at the hotel where we had pre-ordered the food and took a big auto all the way back to Alibaug. I hung around on the beach as the rest of the group went to visit Alibaug Fort. On the beach, the others got to leave their bags and I got to have a gola which I've not had in a very long time. I had a fun time just resting without the hiking shoes and even though the early evening sun was hot, the sitting down helped a lot.

After the others returned, we walked back to the Alibaug ST bus stand and from there, we headed back home in a ST bus. The driver was happy enough to let us sleep and switch off the lights. At night I was not able to see the roads and didn't understand much of the route until we reached Panvel at night. A bit of a heavy dinner at night meant that I got sound sleep.

Changing Mumbai in places where I walk

2011-03-14T04:07:00.000+05:30

I have made it a practice of going on early morning walks (if my father wakes me up). It used to painful in the early days which surprised me given the amount of walking I already did. Dad set a new understanding of what it means to walk quickly. I took my time getting accustomed to faster walking. Friends have always complained that I walk fast. In the mornings, I walk faster. Those early days of pain made me not want to walk again in the evening. Habit set in and I slowly lost my evening walking fun.

In the last two days, I have started the evening walk routine again. This slower walking is for me to notice the changes around my suburb of Chembur. Hit by projects like the Monorail and the Chembur-Santacruz Link Road projects, the places that I walk in is transforming at a very fast pace. Now, I feel that I have lost something of the memories by not photographing it.

The construction work in these lanes has transformed the once sleepy lanes into a very different experience. Walking down these roads is less fun now. I don't know how it would be after the roads and monorail are built. Some one has to chronicle this history of a metamorphosing metropolis. Once sleepy lanes that I used to haunt could in the near future become crowded monorail stations or metro stops. Nostalgia is slowly walking in and I am looking for other sleepy lanes to haunt.

Indian Perspectives on Human Spaceflight

2011-03-03T17:06:00.000+05:30

Dr. Harish, Deputy Project Director, Human Spaceflight Programme, ISRO spoke at Aero India 2011 held recently in Bangalore. The title of this article made me excited enough to want to watch it.

However, after watching the video, it was quite general. His talk was very non-specific and did not have much matter. Some points though involved the choice of the Soyuz style architecture for the crew vehicle based on the Shuttle vs Soyuz experience and safety record of the US and Russia respectively. He talked about how humans would control the flight very mysteriously without expanding on it. He explained that the experience with the Space Capsule Re-entry Experiment (SRE) gave ISRO the confidence to go ahead with the human spaceflight programme. He put across that putting an air conditioning on the SRE would give us the crew vehicle - which is a rather crude way of putting it. He talked about how experience of Apollo management style has influenced India and last but not the least he explained that there is excessive stress on safety.

I do not think that a keen follower of the programme would have missed anything if he did not listen to this talk. However, if you have the time or the inclination, feel free to go through the video. I would like to stress again that Indian scientists and engineers need to get much better at communicating to the common man what they're doing.

Reason for the long solar minimum

2011-03-03T16:22:00.000+05:30

A project funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and Department of Science and Technology (DST) of the Government of India has claimed to have found the reason for the long solar minimum experienced during the last solar cycle. A team led by Indian Dibyendu Nandy of the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Kolkata which included Andrés Muñoz-Jaramillo of Montana State University and Petrus C. H. Martens of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center of Astrophysics.

The results will be presented in Nature magazine today. Nandy has made this webpage about the discovery which to me is incomprehensible. My friend Srinivas Laxman wrote this article in today's Times of India which fares a bit better for comprehension sake. For me the best article on the discovery was by Dr. Tony Philips writing for NASA Science News.

NASA held a media tele-conference on the topic and hence this was widely covered by the press in the US. There seems to be little to no press coverage of the topic in India besides the one written up by Srinivas Laxman.

Budgetary allocation for the Department of Space in Budget 2011-12

2011-03-02T17:49:00.000+05:30

If you have the time, I request you to consider reading the document in full (Excel Sheet). If you do not, here is the document with planned budgetary allocation for 2010-11 against revised figures in 2010-11 in crores of Rupees:

Development of the GSLV Mk-III: 125.64 (against 130.78)

Cryogenic Upper Stage Project: 0.1 (against 0.1)

Continuation of the PSLV: 244.50 (against 224)

for the Vikram Sarabhai Space Center: 463.03 (against 375.18)

for the ISRO Intertial Systems Unit: 39.74 (against 29.63)

for the Liquid Propulsion Systems Center: 231.33 (against 203.02)

for the GSLV (including the Mk-III): 292.46 (against 209.10)

Space Capsule Recovery Experiment: 4.40 (against 4.79)

Manned Mission Initiatives/Human Space Flight: 98.81 (against 14.71)

Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology: 100 (against 10)

Semi-Cryogenic Engine Development: 150 (against 40)

Oceansat-2 and -3: 50 (against 10)

Resourcesat-2 and -3: 32.66 (against 22)

ISRO Satellite Center: 233 (against 244.60)

Laboratory for Electro-Optical Systems: 42.85 (against 36.71)

RISAT-1: 0.95 (against 2)

GSAT-4/GSAT-4R/GSAT-11EM: 50 (against 0)

Navigation Satellite System: 218.30 (against 167.40)

Semi-Conductor Laboratory: 45.72 (against 26.42)

Advanced Communication Satellite (including GSAT-11): 410 (against 35)

Earth Observation - New Missions, (Cartostat-3, TES Hyperspectral, DMSAR-1,ENVISAT,SCATSAT,RISAT-3, Future EO Missions and GISAT): 200 (against 0)

SARAL: 22.5 (against 13)

Satish Dhawan Space Center: 337.25 (against 261.51)

ISTRAC: 45.75 (against 53.75)

Space Applications Center: 291.99 (against 183.80)

Development and Education Communication Unit: 73.56 (against 22.76)

National Natural Resources Management System: 72.84 (against 42.06)

Earth Observation Application Mission: 2.53 (against 2.33)

National Remote Sensing Center: 145.55 (against 154.49)

Disaster Management Support: 34.57 (against 29.97)

North Eastern Space Applications Center: 6.07 (against 0)

Physical Research Laboratory: 48.31 (Against 33.97)

National Atmospheric Research Laboratory: 16.44 (against 8.43)

National Institute of Climate Change and Environmental Studies: 0.1 (against 0.1)

RESPOND: 15 (against 14)

Sensor Payload Development/Planetary Sciences Programme: 30 (against 8.25)

Megha-Tropiques: 2 (against 10)

ADITYA: 40 (Against 5.75)

ASTROSAT-1 and -2: 10 (against 10)

Chandrayaan-1 and -2: 80 (against 25)

Talk by R Navalgund

2011-03-01T18:46:00.000+05:30

I went to the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) on Monday to hear the National Science Day Public Lecture organised by TIFR and the TIFR Alumni Association. The talk was delivered by Ragunath Navalgund, Director, Space Applications Center, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).

At the welcoming address, the TIFR Director gave us a brief about how the day, February 28 had come to being celebrated as National Science Day. He said it was the day that C V Raman had submitted the manuscript which talked about the Raman Effect for the first time. The discovery of the Effect gave Raman a Nobel Prize and is still one of the most renowned discovery by an Indian scientist. He said further that Raman used to give public talks on science in a manner which was understandable to the general public. This is perhaps one of the first examples of science outreach by an Indian scientist. The day was later adopted by the Government of India to be called National Science Day. At TIFR, the day was celebrated by lectures from prominent alumni members.

R Navalgund then gave the Director a copy of the lunar atlas with pictures from the Chandrayaan-I spacecraft. I was thinking of nicking it!

Navalgund began his talk titled, "Remote Sensing of the Earth and the Moon" by talking about remote sensing in general. He defined it and explained how it was different from "seeing with our eyes". He explained the difference as being sensing in various wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum other than just visible light like our eyes. The results are in the form of data sets which are then converted into images. He explained that remote sensing was done from various platforms - low-Earth orbit and geo-stationary orbits depending on their applications.

He moved on to various types of sensing - active and passive and then explained the various techniques of remote sensing. He showed the push-broom type, the pixel-by-pixel type, the synthetic aperture radar and the hyperspectral imaging.

He talked about how various parts of the electromagnetic spectrum could be studied in individual bands interacted with objects on the ground and how these could help in providing useful information. As an example, he talked about studying leaves with red light and near infra red light to understand if leaves were healthy or mature. This data helped in providing the Government a plausible estimate of the healthy plants in the country well before the harvesting period. Similar studies were done in various spectrum for hydrology, cryosphere, forest cover, atmosphere and oceans to provide similar information. Information involved ground water levels, forest covers, smogs, possible fishing zones, crop health prediction and yield.

He then moved on to the remote sensing of the Moon. He showed the various types of craters and features like the central peaks of craters and impact melts. He also showed pictures from the recently discovered lava tube.

The interesting points though came out in the question and answer session. Answering questions by students from Kendriya Vidyalaya, Navalgund came out with quite a few interesting points that were unknown. Speaking on India's participation in the International Space Station (ISS), he said that there was an informal agreement on the possibility of India conducting experiments on the ISS. He said that the discussions were currently on in this regard. The experiments, he said, would relate to the study of green house gases. He said Indian institutions would have to provide a proposal for these experiments and some would also come from within ISRO. Answering another question on the Human Spaceflight Programme, he said that all the designs, approvals and paper work was done. The Programme had got an in-principle nod from the Indian cabinet. Discussions were currently on as to how to implement the programme. The two ideas included doing the testing in a single shot or testing the elements individually as done with Space Re-entry Experiment (SRE). He said the programme was in this phase currently. Answering a question I posed, he shocked me by saying that data from the Terrain Mapping Camera (TMC) and Hyper Spectral Imager (HySI) have been made available online. Srinivas found the website for me, it is here. Navalgund explained that the images were released only after 1 year to aid the investigations done by principal investigators who were the primary users of the data. He said that NASA had separately released the data from the Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3). On Mars, Navalgund said that the plans were currently in drawing board phase and currently, India only had capability to do a flyby or orbiter programme indigenously.

My friend, Srinivas asked the question about why India's CHACE instrument was not given the credit for the lunar water discovery as much as M3 or even Mini-SAR. Navalgund replied that the instrument did have a short operation span and did find spectrum peaks for water, carbon dioxide and other elements. He said a lot of time was spent on calibrating the data properly. This was a long drawn process which possibly led to the CHACE losing out on the credit for the water discovery.

I also met a member of the newly joined Google Lunar X Prize team, Team Indus at the lecture.

Using Chandrayaan-I to find human habitability sites on the Moon

2011-02-24T23:37:00.000+05:30

The current edition of Current Science magazine has the paper by Arya et. all titled, "Detection of potential site for future human habitability on the Moon using Chandrayaan-1 data". The result itself was reported way back in March, 2010. The paper provides more details and some interesting facets. The paper is based on work done by the Terrain Mapping Camera on board the Chandrayaan-I spacecraft.

The high spatial resolution of the Terrain Mapping Camera and the close 100 km orbit helped scientists build Digital Elevation Models (DEM) to help study the lunar terrain in great detail. This was used to study potential human habitability sites on the Moon. Based on previous studies, they concentrated their efforts on riles and lava tubes on the lunar surface. Study on the Oceanus Procellurum region on the Moon showed that lava tubes were good places for possible human habitability. They found that there was no effect of cosmic rays deeper than 6 meters, no effect of solar particles deeper than 1 meter, no radiation effects and no significant temperature difference was observed with the temperature remaining nearly constant at -20 degrees Celsius. It is also opined that the presence of partial lava tube structure reduces requirement of construction. Scientists also think that the cool temperatures here could make these a candidate for water and ice traps on the lunar surface. Lava tubes also provide a dust free environment.

Lava Tubes are interesting to study for reasons other than human habitability as well. To geologists, it provides a section of the lunar bedrock and top soil that would be difficult to access otherwise. It could also help geologists to study native lunar material which has not been affected by external factors like meteoric impacts, solar particles etc. It could also provide an understanding of the thermal profiles and volcanism on the Moon.

The paper now profiles the area of the Moon under study, Oceanus Procellurum using a picture of the Moon taken by the CARTOSAT-2A spacecraft from Earth orbit!

Using various techniques (explained in the paper) they find that the rough cylindrical tube which comprises the lava tube is 120 meters in diameter and 1.72 km in length. The thickness of the roof is 170 meters hence safe from various considerations discussed above (radiation, cosmic rays etc.). The Hyper Spectral Imager (HySI) was used to do chemical and mineralogical study. It was found that the surface was homogeneously basaltic rich in Iron and Titanium. The homogeneity of the results was also used to predict that there was no lava flow after the lava tube was formed. To confirm the result, surface ages of the north and south section of the uncollapsed rille was done using the crater counting technique. Using this method ages of the northern section was found to be 3.47 Ga and the southern section was found to be 3.43 Ga. This more or less rules out "differential emplacements of the mare basalts".

The authors of the paper state that using similar procedures, TMC and HySI data can be used to study different areas on the surface of the Moon.

Three Chandrayaan-I related papers out

2011-02-23T17:27:00.000+05:30

Three papers directly related to instruments on-board the Chandrayaan-I spacecraft are out in 2011. Here's a brief pointer to each.

1. Goldschmidt crater and the Moon's north polar region: Results from the Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M³); Cheek, Pieters et. all

2. Strong influence of lunar crustal fields on the solar wind flow [full paper - PDF]; Charles Lue et. all

3. Lithological mapping of central part of Mare Moscoviense using Chandrayaan-I Hyperspectral Imager (HySI) data; S Bhattacharya et. all

For the first paper, Cheek et. all, have trained their eyes on the Goldschmidt crater. The comparison of spectroscopic details from Goldschmidt to the Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3)'s data of the Northern pole and from three different regions provide three different soil types - feldspathic soils with a low-Ca pyroxene component, feldspathic soils and basaltic soils. The content of Goldschmidt is feldspathic and was found to be locally different from the surrounding highlands. They state that the water spectrum is closely associated with the mineralogy of where the spectrum is located. Goldschmidt is said to have higher concentration of water spectrum compared to the local highlands but is similar to the feldspathic soil in the lunar far side.

The second paper by Charles Lue et all is available in full. The SARA payload on Chandrayaan-I had detected the presence of mini-magnetospheres on the surface of the Moon. The paper Lue et. all believes that these magnetospheres affect the upstream solar winds. This affect the rate of solar wind proton hitting the surface of the Moon and also perhaps space weathering in places near the magnetic anomalies. The team uses data from the Solar Wind Monitor (SWIM) on Chandrayaan-I for these studies. Concluding, they say:

Magnetized electrons are deflected by the magnetic field gradient and set up a charge separation (because protons are non‐magnetized), resulting in an ambipolar electric field. The related potential repels a fraction of the protons. Therefore, the deflection can take place not only over the strongest magnetic anomalies where the protons can be magnetized, but (although at a lower efficiency) also at weak, isolated anomalies of <3 nT at 30 km altitude, with a width of <100 km. Similar charge separation scenarios have been discussed in early studies based on Apollo 12 surface observations [e.g., Neugebauer et al., 1972], and in a recent review paper by Halekas et al. [2010].

This paper too has some influence on the lunar water formation technique suggested of solar wind implanting protons which are used by the OH ions to form water:

Regardless of the deflection mechanism for protons, the high solar wind deflection and reflection rates, as ions and neutral atoms, imply a lower proton implantation rate in the regolith at magnetic anomalies that may alter the space weathering compared to the surrounding areas. Moreover, it might affect the production of OH/H2O in the outermost layer of the regolith via transfer of solar wind‐implanted protons to the mineral‐bound oxygen [Pieters et al., 2009].

The paper is available here in full.

The third paper, Bhattacharya et all investigated the central region of the Mare Moscoviense region of the Moon. The paper has identified 5 geological units:

five major compositional units have been identified: highland basin soils, ancient mature mare, highland contaminated mare, buried unit with abundant low-Ca pyroxene (LCP), and youngest mare unit

The paper seems to be aimed as basis of using the Hyper Spectral Imager (HySI) data to delineate major compositional structures on the surface of the Moon and has done so successfully enabling it to be used for the rest of the data sets obtained.

Madhavan Nair's comments in the Media

2011-02-22T22:08:00.000+05:30

Madhavan Nair has recently been on a commenting and interviewing spree. The bulk of his effort seems to be deflect blame from ISRO on two recent events - the failure of the GSLV and the ISRO/DEVAS deal. His comments on the failure of the GSLV seem a little out of line. His comments on the ISRO/DEVAS deal could be considered as an effort to deflect blame from himself. Whatever the case, his media interactions since the GSLV failure has been interesting to follow.

I have never seen a chair of any failure analysis committee commenting on the progress of the committee as the analysis was on-going. Madhavan Nair seems to be repeating the same statement since the first meeting held in January. He'd begun pointing to the Russian cryogenic engine for the failure of the GSLV in December. This changed from the "German connectors" blamed initially for the failure. The interesting point about this repeated statement is that while Russia is willing to "studying the data provided to them", Madhavan Nair seems to be stressing on this point. Also, ISRO seems to be conducting experiments and we're running dangerously close to the last date for the submission of the report of the GSLV Failure Analysis Committee under the chairmanship of Madhavan Nair. I would think a meeting would be needed to get the results, analyse them and create a cohesive report. Madhavan Nair's various comments [see here and here] to the media vis-a-vis the GSLV seems to be beyond the control of ISRO.

His other interesting comment comes on ISRO/DEVAS issue. I have refrained from commenting on the issue here since my understanding of the same has been very poor. Madhavan Nair did an interview with the Times of India on the issue. His version of the story matches more closely with the version put out by DEVAS than by ISRO. This has now pushed the Opposition to demand that the Prime Minister (who's in-charge of the Department of Space) to make a statement in Parliament on the issue. Madhavan Nair's comments carry weight because he was the man in-charge in ISRO when the deal was operationalised. It seems like Nair is trying to protect himself. It even seems to have worked partially since the Opposition has turned its attention again from him.

While on the topic of ISRO/DEVAS, I'd also like to point out the different approaches that ISRO and DEVAS have taken to put out their statements. ISRO has put out a 5 page PDF (now removed!!) that is a bit confusing and leaves a few questions un-answered and DEVAS has posted a video in a FAQ format that lasts about 4 minutes.

Public lecture by Sir Arnold Wolfendale

2011-02-21T21:46:00.000+05:30

Sir Arnold Wolfendale gave a public lecture at the Marathi Vignan Parishad offices located in Chunabhatti. I saw this place for the first time when I was in a bus and was stuck in the famous Priyadarshini traffic jam. I was interested in going to this place but like everything else never got around to going there. My friend, Suhas Naik-Sattam who works at the Nehru Planetarium informed me about the event through Facebook. The talk was easy to understand and punctuated by humour and his experience over the years.

[caption id="attachment_1117" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Sir Arnold Wolfendale on the dias, second from the left. Image Credit: Pradeep Mohandas"][/caption]

The talk was a collaboration between National Centre for Science Communicators, Marathi Vignan Parishad, Khagol Mandal and International Union of Science Communicators. The talk was titled, "Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence". Before beginning, he took a straw pole of the number of people who believed that we were alone in the Universe (or unique) and the number of people who thought we were not. Only 11 people in the whole room said that we were a unique species in the Universe. Rest of the audience, probably numbering about a 100 with school children involved said that we were not alone. Wolfendale said that over the years, when the same question was asked of the audience only 27% of the audience said that we were a common species.

Wolfendale then shared a story. He said a scientist retired and got himself a place at one of the places in England which end up with a sheer cliff and jagged rocks at the bottom of the cliff and the sea beneath. Once, exploring the stars, the man tripped over and by chance got hold of a branch on the drop. He called for help when a heavenly voice asked him to let go and that He would catch him. "Anybody else, out there?" asked the scientist. Wolfendale said he was looking for that anybody else too - not God.

He showed a picture of Jodrell Bank's Lovell Telescope to demonstrate what a radio telescope looked like and then showed the Arecibo and explained how it was used to search for the above mentioned intelligence - life like us - was done from Arecibo. He spoke about expressions of people over the centuries from 13th century Chinese philosopher Teng Mu through Giordano Bruno and Copernicus and Galileo right upto the Kepler looking for planets in the Universe and wondering about the possibility of life on them.

He then showed the famous Drake Equation, a formula thought to predict the number of detectable civilizations in the Universe. He explained the various terms in the equation, spoke about the possibility of finding their values so that one could substitute them in the Equation to find a plausible result. In explaining these terms, he spoke of SETI and the search started in 1960 by Francis Drake to find the value for "the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space". He spoke of the Mars meteorite activity and how it influenced the debate on "the length of time for which such civilizations release detectable signals into space".

Wolfendale postulated possible time frames for which human like life form could evolve and exist. He guessed the number as 1 billion years. He spoke of solar flares that could damage the atmosphere occuring about once in a million years, an asteroid event like the dinosaurs once every 10⁹ years and the life term of the Sun itself being about 4 billion years.

As he explained this, he gave the evolutionary timeframe and also explained about the rarity of an asteroid impact at Yucatan.

In the end, he said, if an alien civilization existed and one became extinct every billion years, we should be faced with a barrage of alien colonisations which was not happening and hence he sided with the 11 who said that we were a unique alien life form.

To me, the ending was an odd bit of reasoning and the talk ended quite suddenly. I did enjoy the initial part of the lecture, though.

Blogging in Malayalam

2011-02-20T02:46:00.000+05:30

This is another project that I have been trying to do for a very long time. It has been a long time dream to write my blog in Malayalam. I started on this curve by trying to write for the Malayalam Wikipedia. I found here Malayalam that I could not easily understand. This led me to try and read Malayalam newspapers once in a while. Finally, reading this blog post over at Gerrard's blog, pushed me to write Malayalam online.

I do not much of the concepts that have been talked about on Gerard's blog. These are things that would be awesome to learn more about. I have put them separately to learn and research about them. Perhaps, it may not be essential to understand all of them before blogging in Malayalam but this is a good starting point.

Being born and brought up in Mumbai, I have been practicing to write in Hindi and English primarily. I do speak in Malayalam daily at home but do not write as often as I could. This has made me feel sorry sometimes and also feel a sense of contribution to the death of a language. It may not be as the same many other Indian languages with nearly 36 million people speaking the language world-wide but it could very easily get there.

One of my efforts on having these thoughts was to try and write Wikipedia articles in the Malayalam Wikipedia. The thing was that I was not really sure about Malayalam spellings. I knew the alphabet set to read Malayalam but not really write it well. Perhaps it is a great way to reconnect with my grandmother as well.

So, I've written a blog post today without any help from anyone. I've written it using Google Transliteration and have not paid any special attention to the spellings. From tomorrow, for every alternate day, I hope to write something on the blog and begin the curve to improve my Malayalam.

February 21, 2011 is being celebrated as International Mother's Language Day. I hope you do something to begin speaking, reading or writing in your mother tongue.

Digital Sabbatical 1 - February 19, 2011

2011-02-20T02:11:00.000+05:30

I ended my digital sabbatical early today. It was supposed to last from midnight yesterday night to midnight tonight. I cut-off about 4 hours before time.

I first read about digital sabbaticals and knew that I had to give them a whirl. I had been putting it off for at least 8 months now. I finally managed to try it today. Here's a brief report of my efforts.

1. I wasn't able to keep myself from staying offline completely. I did go online for brief amounts of time thrice during the day.

2. I substituted the time offline by spending it on watching television.

Besides these two points, it was also generally a tense 24 hours. This made me not want to go through with a full 24 hour digital sabbatical. The idea behind such a sabbatical was not to have a tense day.

Digital Sabbatical

2011-02-19T03:13:00.000+05:30

I am taking a digital sabbatical from midnight tonight to midnight tomorrow.

Indian team joins the GLXP

2011-02-18T00:18:00.000+05:30

An Indian team, called Team Indus has joined the Google Lunar X Prize. They have not mentioned much about themselves biographically or provided contact information of any kind. Their about page says:

Team Indus seeks to represent the aspirations of one of the world's oldest civilizations and youngest population. Headquartered in New Delhi, India we are a team of professionals from Technology, Science, Finance and Media background all of whom have made a habit of pushing boundaries.

Team Indus is a for-Profit organization and plans for GLXP to be the first step towards establishing a Global Innovation brand. We plan to reward all contributors to our team by ensuring long-term commercial interest. We are in the process of setting up a separate non-profit education foundation that will work towards creating a space education & awareness campaign in India. All donations made to Team Indus will be directly passed onto this foundation. All articles, media generated in our pursuit of GLXP will be assigned to this foundation.

We have a few out-of-the-box theories on each phase of the mission, going radical on technology was the obvious choice given the late entry. Our initial planning suggests we will take about 3years to prepare for a potential launch, the launch in all likelihood will be done from India. Team Indus plans to attempt the Endurance and Distance bonus prizes.

It is a privilege to be part of GLXP's exclusive group of teams, we are excited by the possibilities and eagerly look forward to putting up a good show!

They're aiming for a launch by 2013-14 which is roughly the timeline that Chandrayaan-II is looking at for its launch! Chandrayaan-II, mind you has been in the works with help from Russia from 2009.

It is a challenge and one that possibly can be tackled. I'll be following the team closely through their twitter account. I believe that even if they do not launch in the timeline they have set they must work towards launching because of the novelty of such a concept in India!

Additions: Hubble supports Chandrayaan water discovery

2011-02-15T03:46:00.000+05:30

I wrote quite hurriedly about the Hubble Space Telescope providing support to the Chandrayaan-1 discovery of water in the lunar exosphere. I had provided the links to the story to Srinivas and he's written about in the Times of India [Bangalore, Delhi]. I got a bit worried last night when I saw that the abstract published was presented in the poster session of the meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

With a bit of help from Syed Maqbool Ahmed, PI, CHACE (which made the discovery of water in the lunar exosphere) and Daniel Fischer, I was able to ascertain a few things and I am posting them here for the benefit of everyone concerned.

Daniel informed me that posters are considered "publications" but that a paper in a refereed journal would have greater impact and would be cited more often. It was Syed who finally explained the whole concept to me. The paper in which the result would be published as a paper is expected to happen next month. It is expected to be published in the Astrophysical Journal. One of the persons who presented the poster, Alex Storrs is a co-investigator on the Hubble Space Telescope. Syed explained to me that since they were waiting for the paper to be officially published, they presented it as a poster in the meanwhile.

Trying to find out information about the authors of this poster also took me to a 2009 story in PhysOrg, where Storrs is quoted as saying that initial results did not point any clear evidence for water in the lunar exosphere. It is very interesting that almost a little more than a year later, the same person has confirmed CHACE's results of water in the lunar exosphere.

I was finally able to report to Srinivas that he may relax and that the news is good!

Liam Wyatt and the Mumbai Wikipedia GLAM meetup

2011-02-14T23:12:00.000+05:30

For the past few days, Liam Wyatt has been going around cultural institutions in Mumbai. We had a meetup yesterday at the Pinstorm offices in Santacruz. Our thanks to Netra there who offered and allowed us use of space on such short notice. We had a nice turn up today of around 20-25 people.

We started off with directly with Liam's talk on his work with the British Museum. His work/documentation of his work here can be found here. He then talked about his idea behind doing a project with the British Museum after a controversy the year before with the British National Archives. He said that the relationship was mutually beneficial to both and did not compromise on the principles of either Wikipedia or the British Museum. He talked about the series of conferences called GLAMWIKI that have already happened in London and Paris and are planned in Washington DC and Barcelona.

He then went on to talk about five of the events that he conducted during his 5 month stint as the Wikipedian-in-Residence at the British Museum. These included the Backstage Pass, One on One Collaborations/Photos Requested, Feature Article Prize, the Hoxne Challenge and the School Translations.

Backstage Pass involves a free tour of Museum objects in display and out of display by curators of the Museum for Wikipedians working on an article. The One-on-One Collaborations was an exchange of requests between Curators and Wikipedians who needed each others help - curators to improve articles on Wikipedia and Wikipedians for expert advice on articles in Wikipedia. Photos Requested requested for photos in different parts of the museum. Feature Article Prize was an interesting if controversial experiment. The British Museum offered 100 pounds for the 5 articles in Featured Article in Wikipedia related to an item in the British Museum. This became similar to the pay-for-edit idea. However, the rationale was that since the prize money was not for an article on the British Museum and was for an object/topic related article, it was okay. The Hoxne Challenge was an effort to see how Wikipedians could improve an article on one subject given access to subject experts etc.The subject given was that of the Hoxne Hoard discovered in England in 1992. I think it goes without saying that the article reached Featured Article rating pretty quickly. The last was the School Translations project where a group of French school children that Liam knew translated the articles on certain items in the British Museum from English into French as part of their English class homework. The students later visited London (like they regularly apparently did) and visited the Museum to see the objects they had written about as part of class.

These were some of the implementations possible in the 5 week period whilst Liam was with British Museum.

Bishaka and Liam reported on their visits to The Museum (Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalay) and Jnanapravaha. I accompanied Liam and Bishaka to The Museum. I am pleasantly surprised by the way they have transformed it! We've reported on positive responses from these cultural institutions. Liam and Bishaka will be visiting one more institution tomorrow.

In the discussion that followed, we had a discussion about GLAM applications in Indian libraries and archives. Ashwin Baindur asked about how to work with institutions like Maharashtra Archives which are facing a brunt of the budget cuts (they get the money after the song and dance shows, museums etc all get their cut) and have trouble with up-keep of their archives. Liam replied that this would mainly be in helping them digitise records. The trouble, Liam said, was on where to begin and how to priorotise work. Stating the example of the National Library, Kolkata he said that some books were not even catalogued. We agreed that Libraries and Archives also suffered because there was no good Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software for Indic languages. Liam suggested a French example of how an old French cursive text made it un-OCR-able (new word - mine!) and got help from Wikipedians to manually type in text onto WikiSource.

Bishaka raised the point that all of the GLAM activities could also be simultaneously done in various languages in-parallel. So, during a Backstage Pass event in Mumbai, we could improve the English, Hindi and Marathi (as an example) articles at once.

We then had a brief introduction to pad.ma (I have written about this in detail earlier). The part that relates to Wikimedia Commons was a demo on how a plugin for Firefox developed by the same team helped in uploading files in the .ogg format to Wikimedia Commons.

We had a small reference to the Workshop for Women on Wikipedia (WWW) and we suggested the idea to two students who had come from SNDT Women's University to the meetup. We've requested them to check on the possibility of using their labs to conduct the Workshop in Mumbai on or around March 8, 2011 (to re-iterate: the centenary celebrations of Women's Day.

All-in-all it was a fun 7th meetup of Wikipedians in Mumbai.

Hubble Space Telescope confirms water in lunar atmosphere finding

2011-02-13T03:09:00.000+05:30

Tirtha Pratim Das of the Space Physics Lab, VSSC wrote an article in the Voyage Magazine, a magazine written by a few people working in the ISRO labs about the Hubble Space Telescope confirming the presence of water in the lunar exosphere.

The Hubble Space Telescope was making observations of the LCROSS impact last year when it spotted a continuous signature of water vapour emanating from the lunar exosphere. Writing in the Bulletins of the American Astronomical Society, Storrs et. all write an article called "The Impact of the LCROSS Satellite with the Moon as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope", the authors write:

Images immediately before and after the impact show an enhancement in the scattered light near 300 nm within a minute of the event. Spectra show persistent emission of the OH (1-0) band at 283 nm, which may indicate a permanent lunar exosphere of OH as reported by Sridharan et al (2010), rather than OH produced by photolysis of water liberated by the impact event.

Amidst the hullaboo over the ISRO/DEVAS deal, this is good news for ISRO. Congratulations once again for the CHACE and Chandrayaan-1 teams.

[+ Clarifications]

Need to protect the Lonar Crater

2011-02-10T18:05:00.000+05:30

Suvrat Kher writing today about the Lonar Crater on his blog, Rapid Uplift talks in the last paragraph about the need not only to protect the impact crater but also the ejecta blanket that surrounds it. The Geological Survey of India protects the impact zone itself but not the ejecta blanket which has been threatened by urbanization and agriculture in the locality of Lonar.

Khagol Vishwa has been running a Save Lonar campaign and perhaps some of the recent studies of the crater will enhance its importance and help the organisation achieve the World Heritage Site status that they are asking for Lonar.

India and the Thirty Meter Telescope

2011-02-10T00:48:00.000+05:30

Srinivas, Kirk and I went to the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) offices in Mumbai for a talk by A N Ramaprakash on India's Participation in the Thirty Meter Telescope project. At the outset, let me tell you that the talk degraded in the middle on a single point and we walked out of it. But, I still think there were points discussed that are worth putting out in the open.

India's Decadal Vision Document prepared in the year 2004 called for India's participation in a very large ground-based telescope in the optical or infra-red spectrum. Work on this recommendation began in 2006. The Inter-University Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) had been in touch with efforts like the European Extremely Large Telescope project about such possible Indian participation, but also came to the conclusion that a national effort was needed for such an effort based on the work done by Prof. Padmanabhan.

Aryabhata Research Institute of Observational Sciences (ARIES), Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA), Raman Research Institute (RRI) and IUCAA met on September 16, 2008 for a brainstorming session at IIA, Bengaluru to finalise that India would participate in either European Extremely Large Telescope(E-ELT), Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) or the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) project based on certain criteria. This included a participation of 10-15% in the project; involvement in the construction and operations in India and a national facility setup for purposes related to the telescope.

Members of the E-ELT, GMT and TMT visited India in October, 2008 and made presentations to the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE).

DST asked for a Detailed Project Report (DPR) from the institutions involved i.e. IUCAA, IIA, RRI and ARIES. An Advisory Committee was formed with renowned scientists like Narlikar, Padmanabhan, Kasturirangan and Swarup. Under it were 5 working groups - Technology, Science, Hardware, Software and Human Resources Development were formed along with a Co-ordinating Committee. After many meetings and brainstorming sessions, visits to industry and exposing Indian industry to the idea of working in the project, the Committee presented the DPR set the criteria for selecting a project based on the 2004 Decadal Document.

The criteria included scientific compatibility and capability, synergy with Indian facilities, risk of realizing technologies needed for the project, the partnership model involved and model of project management, cost of project, guarantees and level of contribution that could be made in-kind, possibility of development of human resources in India and suitability for follow up in India.

Ramaprakash then went on to place on record the reasons for the choice of the TMT over E-ELT and GMT.

Ramaprakash said that at first glance, the E-ELT appeared the most appealing because it was an all-around package and involved access to its various facilities. The drawbacks was that becoming a part of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) which ran the project needed an act of Parliament. Besides that, it involved a hefty joining fee which was to be paid in cash (as against in-kind). This, for Brazil was $130 million. The annual subscription fee was related to GDP - which was growing for India. This would mean that India could end up paying money for which India did not have any need for and end up subsidizing the smaller European countries. ESO also had the E-ELT as a stand alone partner but the cost involved in participating in E-ELT would be as good as joining ESO. ESO also did not provide guaranteed telescope time despite paying a subscription - as time was based on merits of observation. This made E-ELT a non-option for India's case.

The Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) was the cheapest and smallest telescope of the bunch. It was a large (14) with small partners. The technology that would be used to build the GMT was considered riskier. The LBT project was one of the worry of the technology aspect of the project. It also required a large contribution in cash. It was also found that the mirror technology was patented by the Steward Mirror Lab, Arizona and hence a problem for the point about Indian contribution in construction of the telescope. Overall, the approach was also deemed to be not scalable for even bigger telescopes.

The Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) was a small collaboration (6) of large partners. It was a low technology risk project with many of the technologies demonstrated at the Keck Telescope. The technology was portable and could be made use of in a future Indian large telescope project. The project also guaranteed 70% of the contribution to the project in-kind. It also helped that the observatory was in the northern hemisphere and was hence suitable for follow-up observations, if necessary from India.

The Thirty Meter Telescope Project was hence selected by India for contribution to it.

The DPR was submitted to the DST in January 2010 and revised subsequently as per DST requirements by February 2010. At this point, the RRI opted out of the project on April 14, 2010. It did not state any reason in writing but stated it had other priority projects. Despite this, the DST gave approval for the project and gave the green signal to join the Thirty Meter Telescope with Observer Status. This was done by India on June 24, 2010. From below, when I mention countries, it refers to the institutions involved in TMT from that country.

Ramaprakash then explained the three steps by which an institution/country could partner with the TMT. These were Observer, Participant and Full Partner stages. The Observer status is something that India shares with China in the TMT. It includes participation in non-executive meetings, participation in science advisory roles, access to internal documentation and had no commitment (in-cash or in-kind) to the project but was to show strong intent in joining the project. The second was the Participant stage at which one signed a Memorandum of Understanding. Canada and Japan were at this stage of involvement. The third was the Full Partner stage involved construction and about 20 years of operations.

The load sharing is currently expected among the 6 participants is roughly 30% US contribution, 25% each from Japan and Canada and 10% each from India and China. The National Science Foundation in the US has been asked to provide 25% funding after choosing either TMT or GMT. It has been directed to make this choice as soon as possible. But despite the choice, the actual fund flow would begin only in 2015. Both TMT and GMT are wooing for this money but have claimed to have strategies if this money does not come through. Various organisations in the US are committed to paying the 30% US share. Canada is in some terms sitting on the fence. It has stated that if work does not begin on the TMT by 2014, it would join the E-ELT project. Japan has gone through a government change whilst this project was on and it has led its scientists to present the case again to the current government. As a result of this, the project does not seem to have the support of the Japanese government yet. Chinese institutions have claimed that they will get full funding for the project by the end of the year.

The TMT partners are currently developing the proposal jointly to be presented to the National Science Foundation and using that as the basis for requesting funding in the respective countries' agencies.

Before going into the status of this project in India, Ramaprakash outlined some of the areas where India could contribute in-kind. This involves polishing of the primary mirror. The primary mirror is made out of 574 segments. The technological challenge is in developing a mass production model for these mirrors to deliver them in time for the project completion. These mirrors have to be delivered at the rate of nearly a segment every two days for them to work within project timelines. He clarified that each segment might need as long as it does to get polished (weeks, months, years) but the challenge was to line them so that a segment is delivered every 2 days. India is competing in this with USA, China and Japan. To provide risk mitigation, TMT will give the work to 2 countries. India is also interested in the segment support assembly, the primary mirror actuators, edge sensors, observation control software, remote observation capabilities and science and data archival capabilities.

This proposal was submitted to DST by the groups in India in November 2010. It includes request for seed funding in prototype development, travel support, human resource development by getting access to observation time in large telescopes. India is in some trouble since we have to convince the TMT project members that it can deliver the 70% in-kind contribution by late 2011.

The DST requirement is that this create the possibility of nearly 300 optical or infra-red astronomers in the country by 2020, increase PhD intake, enhance faculty numbers and participation in TMT instrument construction and use. A slide showing the current number of astronomers in India raised a cry from the audience. It was at this point, that the talk simply spiralled into a slugfest on the possibility on delivering the targets. The audience (mostly astronomers) felt that there would be no way to reach the number of 300. A person even targetted IUCAA (the institution that Ramaprakash was from) saying that the institute could not raise the numbers for which it was developed. As some tempers were lost, Ramaprakash tried to control the talk.

I think rather than taking the project as a challenge, the audience got involved in something un-related. Ramaprakash could have avoided the table which evoked the response that it did from the audience. Also, he tried replying in jest to some serious audience question. Under these circumstances, where the old guard seemed more obsessed with pessimistic views simply showed that astronomy in India had not moved on as thought of and there also seemed to be some friction between older organisations like TIFR and newer ones like IUCAA. All in all, this is bad for Indian astronomy and maybe the reason why young Indians do not turn to this science. The budding and interested amateur astronomy community in India speaks a totally different story! The professional astronomy organisations in the country seem to be in the past century!

Kala Ghoda Arts Festival 2011 - Feb 7

2011-02-09T21:03:00.000+05:30

Kirk arrived in Mumbai again for the Kala Ghoda Festival at quarter to midnight on February 6, 2011. He was to reach at half an hour past two in the afternoon. So, he missed the Festival on Feb 6. I wanted to go there but was tired and a bit lazy to go there in the evening after attending the Chai and Why session at Prithvi in the afternoon.

We headed to Kala Ghoda in the evening of Feb 7, 2011. We had planned on attending the literary session on literary spaces available in Mumbai. We walked in a few minutes into the discussion where Marathi poet Hemant Divate was speaking. He spoke of his work of editing the literary journal Abhidhanantar. He said that Marathi had a vibrant poet community but there is as was a sense of danger that there might not be Marathi poetry or places to publish Marathi poetry very soon. The themes was shared by Divya Nadkarni of Nether.

In reply, Ranjit Hoskote of PEN, a writers association said that since the 1870s the world of literature has been living in this apocalyptic phase of it being the end of the written word or books or good literature. He said that we had done well till date and will continue to do well in the future.

The talk went on about how there needs to be more spaces for literary publication and discussion. The talk was joined in by Sharmishta Mohanty of Almost Island and Indira Chandrasekhar of Out of Print. The session was moderated by Sampurna Chatterji of PEN.

Divya was the youngest of the lot and seemed the most pessimistic. I went on Feb 8 and had a look through the books and did buy the first and second issue of Nether. I hope to read about it whence I complete my massive backlog.

Personally, I think there was no place that a new reader can "learn" about reading such work. There is no known place where one can learn to discern things about the world of Mumbai literature without following it for a pretty long time. The magazines seem to be publishing works of poetry and prose without really helping a reader understand what is happening in the literary scene. The question did come up about the literary scene - and the difference in all the answers showed it had not been thought about or written about. There are now operations like PEN and Caferati in South Mumbai but not yet the widespread Book Clubs culture which could help in strengthening the literary scene in Mumbai.

R K Manchanda on Scientific Ballooning

2011-02-07T02:52:00.000+05:30

Today's Chai and Why session at Prithvi Theatre, Juhu was on "Scientific Ballooning". Manchanda, who has been working with TIFR for about 44 years was faced with a young school going audience brought there in two buses. Manchanda presented about scientific ballooning work done at the National Balloon Facility, Hyderabad and also shared some of the interesting applications and research from the field of scientific ballooning.

Delving into history, Manchanda said that the first balloon was flown on June 4, 1783 and was a paper balloon flown using smoke. The first scientific application of balloon was made in 1912 to study the source of radiation. He shared pictures of early flights of these balloons from India, some even done by Indian scientists like Homi Bhaba. He shared that some of the first balloon was fabricated in the basement of the TIFR, Colaba campus before the current National Balloon Facility was setup in Hyderabad. He ended by mentioning the example of Lighter than Air (LTA) balloons.

After a brief description of Archimedes Principle, the working principle of the balloons. He said that the research balloons had a thin film of polyethylene and were filled with lighter than air gases like hydrogen and helium. On the point of why we used such research balloons, Manchanda said that these were to bypass the effect of the atmosphere which absorbed certain wavelengths of light. He said that it was mainly used for the study of the Very Cold Universe or InfraRed Astronomy and the Very Hot Universe in the ultraviolet and gamma astronomy. He said some of the science themes that balloons cover are astroscience, Earth Sciences and heliophysics. A new and rising field is called Geo Engineering and the balloons are working towards contributing in the field.

Manchanda believes that balloons had a few advantages. He said that balloons could be launched from anywhere, could be made ready in around 6 months, was low cost and was a very stable platform for long duration flights.

Getting back to the National Balloon Facility he said it was established in 1971. It is one of the 5 such establishments in the world and the only one that fabricates its balloons. He said that besides the science, it was also a technology center and hence also conducted research on ballooning to meet the requirements of future science applications. It was started by a gentleman by the name of Gokhale in 1971 who took over the efforts in Hyderabad. Some of the lab facilities like a 184 meter long table, labs for Quality Control, Telemetry and Data Centers and boasts of a 100% flight success rate (with success even during testing phases). In the QnA session, Manchanda said that the Quality crew worked as the balloon was sewed together. These are hand sewn balloons with about 185 sections. The Facility has carried X-Ray, LIDAR, Gamma Ray and InfraRed payloads. The facility has been used by other countries as well and has even been sent out to countries like the US and Canada. He said that the lab had achieved 100% indigenous development capability.

Talking about the balloon flight, he said it went through various stages like planning, wind sounding, launch operations, tracking and cut off and recovery of payload with parachute. Going in depth, he said wind sounding was done to enable to understand the possible track and inform air traffic controllers. He later showed a video explaining the launch operations (unfurling of the balloon, attaching of the payload, filling the balloon with hydrogen gas, tensioning the payload tether and launch of payload). It was tracked using Google Earth using GPS and other modes. When it was ensured that it was in an empty space, cut off instructions were given. The payload would separate from the balloon, a rope attached to the skin of balloon would tear and empty the balloon and would fall on land with a parachute system.

Talking about applications of the balloon systems since 2001. Called the diversity plan, the Centre has concentrated on tethered vehicle, remote operations, airships and balloons. The work on tethered flight was on science, surveillance, disaster management etc. TIFR has been working with Tata Indicom to fly a tethered balloon to a height of 500 meters which helped provide a cell phone network of 60 km region. Normally, the network infrastructure is deployed on top of a building which provides a 3 km region and could pose as a health hazard. Currently, this balloon is planned for rural operations where deploying a cell network would be very expensive.

Another application is something called a quasi geosynchronous platform. Manchanda said that at altitudes of 18-20 km, there was a region where wind velocities fell to almost zero. Deploying balloon platforms to this height would provide an opportunity for providing communication systems.

Talking about ballooning, Manchanda said they were considering balloon flights from Andamans to mainland India (Chennai) and flights over the South pole from India's Antarctic Station, Maitri. The flight from Andamans to Chennai would give a flight time of 3 days and covering a distance of 4500 km, which provides a lot of time for conducting experiments. From Maitri, Manchanda said, the circular pattern of winds over the South pole, would allow balloons to fly in circles, remain in eye contact and could travel for upto 3 weeks, extending the time provided for collecting science data.

Answering a question of why Hyderabad was chosen as the site of the balloon facility, Manchanda said that the closeness to Equator provided improvement in sensitivity of instrument measurements due to rigidity of the magnetic fields near the Equator for studying certain kinds of particles.

Answering another question, Manchanda said that the largest balloon would cost about Rs. 50 lakhs while the smallest balloon would cost about Rs. 50,000.

He mentioned that general operation balloons had a thickness of 6 microns while the ones launched before rocket launches from Sriharikota would have films as thin as 3 microns. He said that each hand sewn balloon had to be filled with 1 cubic meter of Hydrogen to lift a kilogram of payload. Balloons were generally only filled upto 40% to allow for their expansion when in rarer atmosphere at high altitudes. He also answered that various factors led to the balloon launch being either in the night or early morning.

R K Manchanda is also working on a payload for ASTROSAT and said that student payloads are accommodated for free as piggyback. He can be reached via email at ravi@tifr.res.in.

Astrology is not a Science petition

2011-02-06T02:46:00.000+05:30

The Times of India had a report today morning that a public interest litigation (PIL) had been dismissed in the Bombay High Court on the grounds that Astrology is considered a science in India. This is based on a 2004 Supreme Court order which declared Astrology to be a science and allowed it to be taught in Indian universities.

Raghu Kalra of the Amateur Astronomers Association of Delhi has started an online petition requesting the Supreme Court to reconsider its order.

I have signed the petition adding: "Science (from the LatiScience is an enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the world. Astrology's predictions are not verifiable, reproducible or testable and hence not Science."

I wanted to say this: "Science is an enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the world. Astrology's predictions are not verifiable, reproducible or testable and hence not Science."

To teach, Astrology in a University, I do not think it is necessary to establish that it is a science. It can be taught as is.

Day 6 of Project 365 - Mumbai traffic jam

2011-02-06T02:21:00.000+05:30

Day 5 of Project 365 - Overhanging balcony

2011-02-05T01:48:00.000+05:30

A fusion power generator in every home?

2011-02-04T21:18:00.000+05:30

In my early morning flip-through of the Times of India, I came across this interview with M Srinivasan, a retired BARC scientist and the chairperson of the organising committee of The International Conference on Condensed Matter Nuclear Science. About 60 scientists are expected to attend the conference to be held in Chennai next week. The thought that made me pause was Srinivasan's vision of having a nuclear fusion power generator in 20-100 kW category in every home.

The concept is great. It could easily replace the diesel and kerosene guzzling generators that are used in buildings and houses today. It also does away with transmission and distribution losses that comes along with having a central grid style architecture. A recent Google Talk by environmentalist Stewart Brand talked about having a few MW installation of nuclear fission reactors being under design with similar purposes.

Srinivasan describes that cold fusion study in India began with a group of 12 scientists in BARC who were inspired a Times of India report! Following some work, research came to a standstill in the 1990s and then resumed only in 2008.

There is skepticism among the scientific community about the working of cold fusion. This mostly comes out of the non-repeatability of the original experiment conducted in 1989 by Martin Fleischmann of the University of Southampton and Stanley Pons of the University of Utah. Following the results which "did not tally with textbook nuclear physics" in the words of Srinivasan, efforts were made to explain the single positive result. Some even went to the extent of saying that the above was not a nuclear fusion reaction at all! Others have even suggested calorimeter errors.

There have been recent demonstrations of working of cold fusion, some as recently as January 14, 2011.

Carnival of Space #183

2011-02-04T20:36:00.000+05:30

This week the Carnival of Space travels to India. Welcome! Namaste!

NextBigFuture writes about SpaceX's proposal to integrate the launch abort system with the Dragon capsule. The post compares this with previous systems used and enumerates its advantages.

NextBigFuture writes about NASA's Kepler mission finding 1202 possible exoplanets. The post makes note of this discovery and notes that another group has also found 6 exoplanets around one star.

NextBigFuture writes about recent analysis which shows that Universe is flatter and 251 times larger than the visible universe.

NextBigFuture shares the recent NASA presentation which provides an overview of nuclear propulsion.

Discovery News' Ian O'Neill writes about a recent Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) release of a stunning image of a runaway star shocking interstellar dust.

Science Backstage's Gianluigi Filippelli writes about a recent paper by A'Hearn et all on Deep Impact's study of the Comet Tempel 1. This is in the backdrop of Stardust-NExT's mission to do a follow up study of the Comet Tempel-1 on February 14, 2011.

Cheap Astronomy has its next podcast titled Superluminal motion [MP3]. Almost the speed of light!

Urban Astronomer has another look at astronomy fundamentals, this time explaining how the Seasons work.

From the Spanish blogosphere, we have a post by Vega 0.0 who writes about refraction of radio waves in the ionosphere.

In Steve's Astrocorner, he has a fun take on the turmoil people are feeling concerning their new astrological sign,(plus a little science to make it interesting).

Planetary Society Blog's Emily Lakdawalla writes a round up of what's going on with planetary exploration spacecrafts in the month of February 2011. Highlights of the month include the Stardust flyby of Tempel-1 and also for the first time, the STEREO spacecraft is on the opposite side of the Sun enabling us to get a view of the whole Sun at once!

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this edition of the Carnival of Space. You can read the previous Carnival of Space #182 here.

PSLV to fly this February

2011-02-04T20:04:00.000+05:30

For the first launch this year, the ISRO has already started preparations for the launch of three satellites on board the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV). The launch is expected to take place in the morning between February 20 and February 25, 2011.

The main payload is the Resourcesat-2 satellite that will fly as a replacement for the ageing Resourcesat-1. Improvements have been made in the satellite in terms of avionics and improved swath coverage. After launch, the two satellites will operate simultaneously before the Resourcesat-1 satellite will be retired. Resourcesat-1 was launched in 2003 with a planned lifespan of 5 years. The images provided by these satellites are used for applications like vegetation dynamics, crop yield estimates, disaster management etc.

There are two piggybacking payloads. One is the Indo-Russian collaboration project, YOUTHSAT and a Singapore University satellite, XSat-1.

Youthsat is a project proposed by former Indian President, Dr. A P J Abdul Kalam in 2005. It aims to provide an opportunity to Indian and Russian students to work hands-on on scientific instrumentation and data analysis systems. The aim of the satellite is to study solar physics in terms of Solar-terrestrial interactions. The Russian students will study solar activity while the Indian students will work on its impact on the ionosphere. They hope to provide short term forecasts of the impact of energetic solar events on manned and unmanned spacecrafts.

The XSat-1 is Singapore's first satellite being developed by Nanyang Technological University and various others in Singapore. The satellite is ~120 kg developed to image of the region near Singapore. After collecting the data the satellite will also downlink the data to Singapore.

We wish the ISRO best of luck for this upcoming launch!

Day 4 of Project 365 - my phone listening to the Jodcast

2011-02-04T03:04:00.000+05:30

Day 3 of Project 365

2011-02-03T03:34:00.000+05:30

Day 2 of Project 365

2011-02-02T04:02:00.000+05:30

February Observatory improvement: Gauribidanur

2011-02-01T18:09:00.000+05:30

I have been working away at the Wikipedia article on Indian Astronomical Observatory. Towards the end of the month, I requested for an informal review of the article which is on-going. I will go back to it occassionally. Once I complete my GATE 2011 exam on February 13, 2011, I want to take it to the folks at Homi Bhaba Centre for Science Education where I hope to get some help on improving the article further besides the help I get from Wikipedians.

In February, the target article is the radio observatory at Gauribidanur near Bengaluru. The article is currently a stub article and getting the whole month to edit and improve it. Your help is welcome. Specially with pictures!

Day 1 of Project 365

2011-02-01T00:57:00.000+05:30

[caption id="attachment_1017" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Day 1 of Project 365. One Photo Everyday for 365 Days. Image Credit: Pradeep Mohandas"][/caption]

Wikipedia X Celebrations in Mumbai in pictures

2011-01-27T23:54:00.000+05:30

[caption id="attachment_998" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="The Welcome board. Image Credit: Pradeep Mohandas CC-SA-NC"]
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[caption id="attachment_999" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Moksh Juneja introducing the Celebrations. Image Credit: Pradeep CC-SA-NC"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_1000" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="The Wikipedia Tenth Anniversary cake in Mumbai. Image Credit: Pradeep Mohandas CC-SA-NC"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_1001" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Barry Newstead (you have to take my word for it :) ) cutting the Wikipedia cake. Image Credit: Pradeep Mohandas CC-SA-NC"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_1002" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Moksh Juneja entertaining the audience while Jimmy Wales message buffers on Vimeo. Image Credit: Pradeep Mohandas CC-SA-NC"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_1003" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="As Jimmy Wales video buffers, a few Wikipedians share their experiences. Image Credit: Pradeep Mohandas CC-SA-NC"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_1004" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="As Jimmy Wales video buffers, a few Wikipedians share their experiences. Image Credit: Pradeep Mohandas CC-SA-NC"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_1005" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="The cake was plundered immediately after the cake cutting. Image Credit: Pradeep Mohandas CC-SA-NC"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_1006" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="As Jimmy Wales video buffers, a few Wikipedians share their experiences. Image Credit: Pradeep Mohandas CC-SA-NC"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_1007" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="As Jimmy Wales video buffers, a few Wikipedians share their experiences. Image Credit: Pradeep Mohandas CC-SA-NC"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_1008" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="And finally the Jimmy Wales video plays...Barry Newstead on the left. Image Credit: Pradeep Mohandas CC-SA-NC"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_1009" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Barry Newstead shows the first edit from India on the Wikipedia article on India by user:Sivaraj. Image Credit: Pradeep Mohandas CC-SA-NC"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_1010" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Kundan Amitabh giving his talk on Indic Wikipedia. Image Credit: Pradeep Mohandas. CC-SA-NC"][/caption]

Liam Wyatt coming to India

2011-01-27T18:48:00.000+05:30

I first heard of the name of Liam Wyatt when Erik Moeller, Danese Cooper and Alolita Sharma came to Mumbai in December, 2010. A week ago, I was informed that he was coming to India on a "GLAM tour" visiting Mumbai, New Delhi and Bangalore. A page has been created by the Wikimedia Chapter in India for the project.

GLAM stands for Gallery, Library, Archives and Museums. These are institutions where public information is made available and is used to support articles on Wikipedia other than newspaper reports. It therefore made sense to collaborate with them with an idea of improving both the GLAMs and Wikipedia.

Liam has worked on projects in the UK and Australia. Doing this project in India brings to the fore some interesting challenges:

The awareness about GLAM even among Wikipedians is not that high.

There are multiple language sources present in GLAMs in India. It is questionable if one person can always do the best work in all languages.

The awareness of licenses such as Creative Commons or its use may not be known in GLAM circles in India. I am not an expert on this and maybe they are aware of this.

It is under these conditions that Liam is visiting India. He plans to visit GLAM institutions in India and speak with them. Personally, my interest area is in Libraries. I cannot claim to have an interest in the arts although history is interesting to me. I am also interested in Archives and accessibility to archives in India would be an interesting area to work in. Hence, I would mostly be interested in working with Libraries or Archives.

The Sabarimala Lights mystery

2011-01-26T05:16:00.000+05:30

It took a stampede that killed 102 people for the Kerala High Court to question the Travancore Devaswom Board which manages the holy shrine at Sabarimala to clarify whether the 'divine light' seen on the Makar Sankranti Day is man-made or not.

The rationalist groups which abound in Kerala and Tamil Nadu have been trying to get to the bottom of this story since 1970s. Interestingly, the head priest at Sabarimala issued a clarification in 2008 in a bid to end the controversy. He said that there were two objects involved. One, which he called the "Makaravilaku" (Makara lamp), was a light lighted by adivasis in the past and which was taken over by the Kerala Forest Department in the 1950s, when the head priest's father installed the Ayyappa idol after a fire. The Makarajyothi (Makara Light) is a celestial object and thought to be Sirius. The family only defines it as a star visible when the Sun transitions from Dhanu (Sagittarius) to Makara (Capricorn).

The words of the Kerala Cabinet about not wanting to interfere in people's faith is worrisome. This is not about faith but rather a misconception of a miracle where there is none. It is necessary to make people aware of this event. The media, which got into a frenzy in trying to bring the mystery lights into viewing audiences around the world 5-6 years ago are also to blame. They repeatedly stressed the word "divine" in their running commentaries on the spectacle. Their collusion in this matter is almost inescapable.

One also needs to think is that will people stop thronging this holy place. Has not many holy places seen a rise in the number of devotees? But, here to the blame would fall on the Devaswom Board for not expanding facilities or employing better crowd management when the number of people thronging the site has seen an increase.

[caption id="attachment_990" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Family watching the broadcast of Makara Sankranti day from Sabarimala. Image Credit: Kirk Kittell"][/caption]

Even my family has been watching this spectacle on TV. Myself included. Were we colluding with our silence? I wrote about this in 2006-07 when perhaps the first doubts were raised about the mystery lights again (this post was one of the inspirations for that article which I cannot find now). I still continued watching the telecast of the event, this year while Kirk was here.

Betelgeuse going supernova?

2011-01-23T17:07:00.000+05:30

It was very recently that I found out that my birth star Thiruvathira is the star Betelgeuse in English. So, I was quite troubled to read that the star Betelgeuse may soon go supernova. In all things related to such news in astronomy I turn to Phil Plait's brilliant Bad Astronomy blog. As usual, he has an answer to this question. The star is a red giant and is expected to go supernova.

Walking in the Dream Run in the Mumbai Marathon

2011-01-20T22:31:00.000+05:30

Posting here has been low because I have been going through Mumbai with Kirk, who is on his between-the-jobs-vacation. I wanted to post several times but just didn't to let the whole week pass through. Kirk is probably now in Jaipur to attend the Jaipur Literature Festival. I have several pictures and stuff to share from the week but I'll begin with the Mumbai Marathon.

The only thing to do in Kirk's Mumbai To-Do List was the Mumbai Marathon 2011. He ran the 42 km marathon. Three days before the Marathon, Srinivas called up to ask me if I was interested in "running" the 7 km Dream Run. I told him that I was in no shape to run 100 meters much less 7 km. He appeased me and informed me that all I had to do was walk! I bought in and decided to meet the next day - so that I could get my marathon kit.

[caption id="attachment_973" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="My bib number for running the Dream Run in the Mumbai Marathon"][/caption]

I and Kirk met Srinivas outside of the Times of India office and he led us to Cross Maidan to show where the Marathon would begin and end. He handed me my bag and we were to go to his wife worked to collect my T-shirt. After lunch, we headed there in a cab. Kirk had been previously asked about running for the organization that Usha worked with. On reaching there, Kirk learnt that the option of running for them was still open and he agreed to run the Full Marathon for them. After picking up the polo t-shirt we headed to Landmark to look at the bookstore.

I and Kirk left Chembur early in the morning to reach Cross Maidan in time (6:15 am) for Kirk to begin his full marathon run. On the local train, we were met by a bunch of Full and Half Marathon runners. The Half Marathon runners got off at Kurla to head to Bandra for their run which was to begin from there. We walked over to Cross Maidan following a line of runners who were headed to the same destination. Thanks to getting the bib from Srinivas, I could enter the ground as well. Kirk then left to warm up.

I began my search for safety pins. I tried a few organizers, doctors and hawaldars. One of the organizers was also a top guy organizing the event and he gave me a quaint look and said, "I am the Event Manager". :) I smiled and walked on. Srinivas called and said he would get a few pins with him. I still walked around to look for an easy place to get the safety pins but the hour of the day was an odd time to look for them.

[caption id="attachment_975" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Srinivas in his Chandrayaan-I t-shirt during the Dream Run. Image Credit: Pradeep Mohandas"][/caption]

[gallery link="file" columns="4"]

I was joined by Srinivas who came in his Chandrayaan t-shirt and cap. He now re-affirmed that all I had to do in the Dream Run was to walk. As the day broke and I was witness to sunrise over the University building, the crowd slowly filled the ground in their different colours and musical instruments. As time passed, people came in dressed up as various things - the common man, the former President Abdul Kalam, an onion, guys in stitches, tribals, an Indian woman etc. As the fervour built up, the gates opened for the Dream Run participants to head for the Holding Area. We began our slow and crawling walk into the Holding Area.

Srinivas was excited as ever and was providing running commentary on passers-by which ensured not a sad moment during the entire walk. The new marathoners began running in their effort to live up to the name of "Dream Run". I just walked silently through the streets trying to soak in the experience. Celebrity encouragement and encouraging music didn't push me to want to run and hence, walked on. There were also a bunch of school girls along the road who encouraged me to run and I just waved back. :) I had absolutely no intention to run and give away what a poor runner I was and how my stomach would wobble when I did. Walking was and still is the safest option.

We walked along Marine Drive, went right upto NCPA and then up to Princess Street Flyover and then down towards Metro where we ended the walk. While walking towards NCPA, I had word from Kirk that he had completed his 42 km run in 3 hours 45 minutes. We enjoyed some of the music, the low flying helicopters with their TV crew and people standing along the street wondering what mad people would walk down so early on a Sunday morning.

We met Kirk at Cross Maidan and after a round of congratulations (for Kirk not for me!) we headed back home for a bath and then lunch. Would I do it next year? Probably, if I'm not running the Half Marathon!

[A good after story is that I accidentally deleted most of my camera pics and this was lost in the sea. Saved some, which I have uploaded here.]

Improving Wikipedia articles on Indian observatories

2011-01-11T04:48:00.000+05:30

In 2009, I began an effort to travel to all the observatories in India. This was mostly in commemoration of the 2009 International Year of Astronomy. Personal issues prevented me from going out on a tour of these observatories that I had planned. By announcing things without having a plan I screwed up the whole thing. I had way too many expectations than could be fulfilled. I had no idea about how to go about doing things and I basically hid away from anything related to the project. The idea is still open to anyone who wants to try it out. I, myself am still interested in doing this tour.

In late 2010, I became a SEDS alumni and as I moved out many of the things that were not vital for me, I could not push this project outside of my view. I also got hold of a book called "Telescopes in India" by Mohan Sundar Rajan published by the National Book Trust in 2009.

These are the astronomical observatories in India(in no particular order) -

Indian Astronomical Observatory

Giant Meterwave Radio Telescope

Girawali Observatory

Udaipur Solar Observatory

Pachmarhi Telescope Array

Gauribidanur Radio Observatory

Kodaikanal Solar Observatory

Mount Abu Observatory

Aryabhata Research Institute of Observational Sciences

Vainu Bappu Observatory

Ooty Radio Telescope

Instead of sending another batch of emails announcing that I was (again) going on a tour of the Indian observatories, I decided to first work and improve their Wikipedia articles. This was something that I started doing in 2009 and later abandoned. In 2011, I hope to begin this effort anew by concentrating on improving the article of one observatory per month. By January 2012, I hope to have added minimal information relating to the Observatory - location, telescopes, instruments and some history.

This time, I have no qualms of admitting to my limitations. I have sent an email to the general Wikipedia community to learn what can constitute a good article on Observatories. I also hope to send a similar email to Wikipedians working on Astronomy articles. I also want help from astronomy friends in getting good references and pictures that they might have learnt of. In the end, I also have stopped expecting that this would be a great Wikipedia article.

I am learning the science and technology behind the observatories, learning a few facts at a time and learning them well. For January, I am going to improve the Indian Astronomical Observatory article. If you can help in any way please do get in touch with me via the comments or email me at pradeep.mohandas@gmail.com.

Unrelated: I will be hosting Kirk Kittell in Mumbai over the next few days.

Techfest 2011

2011-01-09T05:28:00.000+05:30

I have tried to implement a gallery here using native WordPress tools. Pictures are below as well, with text.

[gallery link="file" columns="4"]

I went early today morning for IIT-B's Techfest 2011. I had decided on the outset to take it easy. At entrance, I was greeted by a long crawling line for entry through the Main Gate. I think that the IIT-B crowd could have made it easier on the security by splitting the entry points among security and allowing more people through the gates. At the end of the line, the reaction of the security guards made one wonder what the line was about in the first place.

[caption id="attachment_945" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="The long line outside IIT-B for entry into Techfest. Image Credit: Pradeep Mohandas"][/caption]

Another annoying point was that people arriving in cars were allowed to enter quicker than a person who had walked or used public transport. This person was not made to stand in line. In effect, a person would prefer to come for Techfest by car and be treated differently and this really blew all of the management's claims of protecting the environment.

I first went to the Handwriting Analysis thingy. Having a scientific bent of mind, I have stayed away from subjects not conventionally thought of as science and technology, but now a curiosity has arisen to find out what it's about. After writing about half a page of some information I dug from Wikipedia on space milestones in January 2010, my handwriting was read by a girl who was probably my age at best. She told me about 20 things about myself for free and got about 19 right. That puts her deduction score at 95%. I think I must have missed on one or two in the number of points she told about me but those were right too.

[caption id="attachment_946" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="The rear view of the Brahmos missile model placed in IIT-B Techfest. Image Credit: Pradeep Mohandas"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_947" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Front View of the Brahmos missile at Techfest. Image Credit: Pradeep Mohandas"][/caption]

The only highlight of the DRDO exhibition for me was the Brahmos exhibit. The rest seemed to be dealing with things that handled at the sub-system level and materials - not something everyone would be interested in. I thought adding Tejas would have been really cool - even a scale model. Some were even a repeat from 2009, the last time I went there. I also managed to ask them if I could borrow their range for some amateur rocketry! Their answer was that I could but only if I had the licenses to show them and the famous "through proper channels". This means it can be done!

[caption id="attachment_948" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Poster showing Land, Sea and Air applications of the Brahmos. Image Credit: Pradeep Mohandas"][/caption]

The next highlight of the day was the Nuclear Power Corporation of India's next indigenous water reactor design which was made available. The personnel at the stall were found chit chatting with each other, which was a shame since I wanted to learn more but was too shy to ask them to give me an explanation. They also handouts talking about their "Environment Stewardship Programme" but which doesn't seem too inspiring.

[caption id="attachment_954" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="India's first 540 MWe indigenously designed Pressurised Heavy Water Reactor. Image Credit: Pradeep Mohandas"][/caption]

I also met the guys behind Pratham, IIT-B's first student satellite. They shared that they hoped to get a ride on PSLV-C17 or C18 this year but they still have a few tests to go through. We thought off meeting up in the evening but did not. I liked the explanation that the guys were giving to the general public and was a bit disappointed to learn that these guys are not doing amateur rocketry here!

[caption id="attachment_956" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="A model of the Pratham of IIT-B. image credit: Pradeep Mohandas"][/caption]

All in all, the Techfest seems to be in the beginnings of loosing its sheen probably because it has grown too big. I could be wrong seeing that I only went there today.

[caption id="attachment_958" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Student taking back the model of Pratham on a bicycle - the mode of transporting India's first Rohini sounding rocket as well. Image Credit: Pradeep Mohandas"][/caption]

To end on a positive note, I liked how the Pratham guys took away the satellite from the exhibition. They took it on a cycle which immediately reminded me about how they bought the Rohini sounding rocket onto the launch pad - on the cycle!

ISRO @ The Indian Science Congress 2011

2011-01-08T00:11:00.000+05:30

The coverage of the Indian Science Congress before the Congress itself had been very low-key. But the stories emerging since then show a very vibrant Congress in progress. I have limited myself to ISRO and space related news only.

The stories began with speculation of the absence of ISRO Chairman, Dr. K Radhakrishnan and former ISRO Chairman, Dr. Madhavan Nair. The speculation suggested that the double failure of the GSLV may have caused the two to give the Congress the slip. I believe otherwise. I think that the failure had caused great concern in ISRO and has forced them to set a very tight schedule for the release of the Failure Analysis Report and all related reviews by January 2011 and the complete review by February 2011. This schedule could not have been followed if the persons leading this Committee had spent their first few critical days at the Congress.

Dr T K Alex, Director, ISRO Satellite Center made remarks which were carried by media in varied emphasis. One of the first was on ISRO efforts to replace the aging transponders and also providing for the increase in demand. ISRO plans to tackle this by leasing transponders on foreign satellites, launching two satellites - GSAT-8 and GSAT-10 using foreign launch provider ARIANESPACE and launching a lighter GSAT-12 satellite using the reliable PSLV system.

He continued with comments on the various developments of small satellite systems by Indian University students. IST would like to congratulate ISRO on its particular emphasis and the success of this program. Anna University and students from engineering colleges in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka have already launched ANUSAT and STUDSAT-1 respectively. Notice that the top engineering college in the country are not the first to have taken this innovative step. However, they have caught up with IIT-Bombay and IIT-Kanpur working on Pratham and Jugnu respectively. Other Universities working in this effort are SRM University (SRMSat), Vellore Institute of Technology (VITSAT) and Satyabhama Institute of Technology. Extending on the topic, Dr. Alex explained the use of small satellites across the world in civilian and military fields and also in proving new technologies. He also stressed on the because of the demand created by these projects by the educational sector and asked them to embrace it.

Perhaps the most played up comment was:

The connectors are German made

I would like to state clearly that whatever the source of the connectors, it is the duty of the purchaser (ISRO) to ensure that the quality standards would meet the purchasers requirements. The Indian media presented this comment as if Alex was blaming the German suppliers for this mishap. I would like to believe that he was only stating a fact. ISRO personnel must be more careful with their choice of words.

Suresh Kibe of ISRO commented on ISRO's navigation related projects. Talking about Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System (IRNSS) which hope to offer pointing, navigation and timing services, he explained that the system hopes to work with 7 satellites deployed initially followed by an increase to 11 satellites. Talking about GPS Aided Geo Augmented Navigation (GAGAN), he explained that the system would be implemented by 2012 and will enable safer air travel.

R Navalgud, Director, Space Applications Center spoke about the capability of launching remote sensing satellites to geo-stationary orbits to help India keep a constant vigil at its borders. DRDO and Air Force officials made separate announcements about Naval and Air Force satellites which will be launched by ISRO over the next year or two.

V Adimurthy of the Vikram Sarabhai Space Center spoke about India's need to have a department to look at the problem of space debris. The introductory paragraph of the story linked is absolutely stupid and misleading. He said that ISRO is working on the problem of how to actively remove space debris and is collaborating with the world to find a solution to solve this problem.

The other space reference that has been carried by the media was that of Emeritus Professor P Dayanandan who talked about India's need for having a comprehensive space biology policy.

Space in daily Indian life: The Juno Mission

2011-01-05T17:23:00.000+05:30

The Indian audience still sits captivated by TV shows (whatever may be the genre). So, TV is where some of the innovative space related ads that appear. The trend has been more visible since the Chandrayaan mission in 2008. Godrej Aerospace and L&T began boasting of their contributions to the mission.

Perhaps one of the more visible ads since then is the Maruti Suzuki ad "Kitna Deta Hai?" (What's its mileage?)

The ad features a NASA scientist giving a demonstration of the Juno mission (yes, such a mission exists, read on to learn more) to a bunch of Indian tourists who in question can only ask What is it's mileage? I think this is a wonderful comment about Indian pragmatic sense when it comes even to high end technology. I am guessing Indian rockets don't give the best of mileage but they certainly give the greatest bang for the buck, as the saying goes.

NASA does have a Juno mission to Jupiter referenced to in the above ad. In fact, it is set to launch from Earth on August 2011 and is expected to reach Jupiter in July 2016. As always NASA TV has created a mission trailer inserted below:

It's interesting that the Indian ad industry is referencing such a contemporary NASA mission!

International Year of Forests 2011

2011-01-05T04:47:00.000+05:30

The UN has declared 2011 as the International Year of the Forest. It has made spreading the word difficult by making it difficult to share its logo. But, forests are a subject that I think we must help with despite the red-tape. India is not a participant to the celebration, but you may know by now that I don't need government help to celebrate.

The idea behind the celebration is "to raise awareness on sustainable management, conservation and sustainable development of all types of forests".

My participation would primarily be in the form of adding information related to forests on Wikipedia through January 2011. For January, I hope to be adding information on the article on the Indian Forest Services. I will then begin looking for a list of forests in India and then begin editing them. I will let you know in the first week of February my targeted pages for that month. January has already taken a dimension of the mammoth but I am making a lot of time available to my reading and doing such stuff since my digital clean-up!

Elimination

2011-01-04T23:10:00.000+05:30

I have started reading Tim Ferriss' book The 4-Hour Work Week. There is a quote in that book which has been picked up from Bruce Lee:

One does not accumulate but eliminate. It is not daily increase but daily decrease. The height of cultivation always runs to simplicity.

This leads me to the entire simple living movement in the USA through - Leo Babauta, Tammy Strobel, Chris Guillebeau et. all in 2010. We've neither had a financial crisis or produce the per capita pollution they emit in the USA. These are two of the reasons that seem to be spreading this movement in the USA. But, we have the reason to follow in the minimalistic pathway too here in India. One is to adjust for the population that we have in India and to allow for emissions of people who may not be able to reduce emissions because the technology to do so is not affordable to them. Another reason to do so is because we must not follow down the path that we know is dangerous for everyone.

Personally, I began reducing the stuff that I have. It has not finished but has reached bearable levels. The removed stuff has been given to people who want to reuse it or to my local recycler. I have also stopped taking plastic bags from shops. I have to admit that this is not a blanket stop. Sometime, I wasn't able to manage without one and had forgotten my cotton bag at home or was an emergency when I was placed in a situation where I did not think I would be making purchases.

In 2011, I hope to reduce this even more. As I said yesterday, I have eliminated all the un-important things that I had been subscribed to. I am a human being and can only solve one problem at one time. I have identified the problem and work has begun on solving it. I do not want other problems bothering me right now.

Even in space, 2011 will be the time to reduce my several commitments to various space bodies that I have been invested in. I am happy to say that I have reduced my interaction with SEDS (which I co-started) throughout 2010 to significantly less levels. I hope to do the same for SGAC by end of 2011 and hope to throw my weight behind work on the Moon Society particularly.

In reading, I have strayed from the reading one book after finishing the one I am currently reading because there were too many opportunities which I could not easily miss. This led me to now work on this issue. I have unsubscribed myself from various groups and mailing lists on the various problems that interest me and have kept myself in only a few. I may miss out on a few as a result of this, but I think this is a more effective way of doing it.

2011 begins with a digital clean up

2011-01-04T04:42:00.000+05:30

I hadn't hoped to start it on this note but it did turn out that way. Starting December 30, 2010, I have been cleaning and scraping my digital landscape clean. It is now ready and squeaky clean.

The blog: I have removed unnecessary plugins which I was not using, themes which I was not using and also the sidebar which now has only the copyleft permission on the left sidebar. Over the next month I hope to remove the whole sidebar. I've also removed drafts or posted them on the last two days of the year without polishing them. I've removed all unnecessary pages. In 2011, the idea will be to avoid them rather than clean them up later.

Facebook: I have reduced the time I spend on Facebook. I have removed most of the apps and games from there and also unsubscribed from various groups. I have removed myself from groups rather mercilessly.

Twitter: I have also mercilessly removed people who have not updated their twitter feeds for more than 60 days. I have also removed people I was following with whom I was not interacting and whose feed did not interest me. Sorry, not a comment on your feed but a comment on my interests. Don't worry friends I know in the physical world have been saved!

Pendrive: I carry most of my information on a 4 GB pen drive. I have deleted everything off my desktop that does not fit into this pen drive. Everything I really care about occupies just 3 GB. I have also removed old e-books downloaded from Gutenberg and various softwares. I have also deleted multiple backups from different dates. All data is now backed up as well.

All is well and ready for 2011. To re-iterate: In 2011, the idea will be to avoid them rather than clean them up later.

Chai and Why?: Atul Gurtu on LHC

2011-01-02T22:38:00.000+05:30

I went along with my cousin for my third Chai and Why? session, a public outreach initiative by the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR)in collaboration with the Prithvi Theatre at Juhu. The talk was titled "The God Particle and the Invisible Universe - the coming of the LHC'. Atul Gurtu works with the TIFR and opened what he said was Season 3 of Chai and Why? This is the 25th episode. The talk centred on the importance of the Higgs particle, the implication of understanding the invisible universe and the 6 months or so work at the Large Hardron Collider (LHC).

The talk was not as fun as previous such talks go but was slightly informative in that I came away with a better understanding of the LHC. I already had a pretty good picture of the sub-atomic world and that perhaps reduced the fun since it became largely repetitive theoretical class than a public outreach session. But, kudos to such efforts and hope there are more.

He began by providing a picture of the sub-atomic world and our current understanding of them and the Standard Theory that currently provides a good picture of this world. The Higgs particle is called the God Particle because it is seen to be pervading the whole universe and because it gives the sub-atomic particles the mass that they carry. This, he said was the reason for finding the Higgs particle and why the LHC was searching for the articles.

He said, humans had done high energy physics since the time of the cave people. He said that in those days, the human hands were the accelerators, the stones were the particles and the eyes and skin were the detectors. Today, things have got sophisticated and this has made the requirement of instrumentation and computers to replace them. I liked this analogy a lot.

Going on to the matter of the invisible universe, Gurtu said that high energy physics and cosmology was coming closer to each other. Observations of the spinning galaxies showed difference between the speeds of the stars at a distance from the center of the galaxy and the theoretical predictions were found. This was expected to be explained with the conjecture of dark matter or that of super-symmetry of particles.

The Higgs particle is expected to be seen with energies reaching 1 TeV. With LHC reaching energies of at least 2 TeV, there was now no excuse not to detect the Higgs particle. Also, because of the high intensity the probability of formation and discovery of the Higgs particle is higher. He made it analogous to throwing more darts and having some probability of hitting the bulls eye. This combination of higher energy and higher intensity made this a definitive test of finding the Higgs particle.

Gurtu said that results obtained in the last 50 years was reproduced in the last 6 months of the LHC running. He predicts that if the current good run continued they could find the Higgs particle as early as 2011. They also hope to keep it running till 2013. The scientists hope to meet next at the Chamonix workshop in mid-January, 2011 to discuss the LHC. He also said there was need for experimental guidance if the LHC experiment was to be taken to the next level.

Looking ahead at 2011

2011-01-01T20:39:00.000+05:30

I did not write anything about 2010 because it was primarily a forgettable year. I have been procrastinating, not working hard and everything else that those self-improvement books tell you to do to succeed. The first thing out of the window is those very self-improvement and philosophy books. I gather that they might be a fun post-senior-citizenship reading. So, this is how the year looks like to me now:

In January, Kirk is coming to Mumbai and I will go around with him and then possibly to the Jaipur Literature Festival.

Also in January is the tenth anniversary of Wikipedia celebrations across the world. Mumbai is also participating. I'll be in attendance.

I'll also begin working on paper designs of a liquid fuel engine for the ILPX this year.

I'm writing the GATE 2011 examination.

I'm hoping to get a job by March, 2011 or else start something on my own or something.

I plan on doing at least one test flight of a solid propelled amateur rocket.

I am planning to finish my two year stint as NPoC for SGAC this year.

I hope to read at least 52 books this year.

I hope to write at least 365 blog posts this year.

I hope to get back to my self-measurement tool kit that I had in 2009 and which I abandoned in 2010.

I hope to basically live my life to the fullest in 2011.

I want to take up two things very seriously this year besides the liquid engine design work and a job. Those are trekking and learning to play the violin. I hope to continue on my editing spree on Wikipedia and this year to begin planning for a Tour of Indian Telescope spots.

Four hundredth post

2010-12-31T23:48:00.000+05:30

This is the changing point. This is my four hundredth post. Next post in the New Year.

Happy New Year!!

Basic Outline for a day in 2011

2010-12-31T23:47:00.000+05:30

A new basic outline for daily activities makes sense:

6:30 am: Wake up

9:30 am: Breakfast

1:00 pm: Lunch

5:00 pm: Evening Walk

9:00 pm: Dinner

11:00 pm: Sleep

I hope to record and maintain better this year.

Preliminary Findings of the GSLV Failure

2010-12-31T23:27:00.000+05:30

ISRO has just posted the preliminary findings of the GSLV Failure. This is what it has to say on what happened:

The performance of the GSLV-F06 flight of December 25, 2010 (with GSAT-5P Satellite onboard) was normal up to 47.5 seconds from lift-off. The events leading to the failure got initiated at 47.8 seconds after lift-off. Soon, the vehicle started developing larger errors in its orientation leading to build-up of higher angle of attack and higher structural loads and consequently vehicle broke up at 53.8 seconds from lift-off (as seen visually as well as from the Radars).

As per the Range safety norms, a destruct command was issued from the ground at 64 seconds after lift-off. The flight was hence terminated in the regime of the First Stage itself.

After this ISRO constituted a preliminary failure committee which has found this:

The finding of the Preliminary Failure Analysis Team is that the primary cause of the failure is the untimely and inadvertent snapping of a group of 10 connectors located at the bottom portion of the Russian Cryogenic Stage. Some of these connectors carry command signals from the onboard computer residing in the Equipment Bay (located near the top of the vehicle) to the control electronics of the four L40 Strap-ons of the First Stage. These connectors are intended to be separated only on issue of a separation command at 292 seconds after lift-off. The premature snapping of these connectors has led to stoppage of continuous flow of control commands to the First Stage control electronics, consequently leading to loss of control and break-up of the vehicle. The exact cause of snapping of the set of connectors, whether due to external forces like vibration, dynamic pressure is to be analysed further and pin-pointed.

The full Failure Analysis Committee has also been constituted under the chairmanship of former ISRO Chairman Madhavan Nair to not only to analyse not only to go into the problems of the GSLV's current flight but also of the six previous flights and the corrective actions for both the GSLV and the use of the remaining one Russian cryogenic engine. The committee has 11 members from both inside and outside ISRO. This is definitely a positive outcome and also the fact that it has been given a timeline of up to January 2011 to present their report.

Although seemingly late, they have also constituted a Programme Review and Strategy Committee. This will look into the broader implications for the GSLV Programme, assured launches of INSAT-3D and Chandrayaan-II, operationalisation of the indigenous cryogenic stage and meeting the immediate shortage of transponders being faced by the nation. This seven member Committee will be chaired by another former ISRO Chairperson, K Kasturirangan.

These reports will submit their reports in January 2011 to a National Experts Panel that will study the report. Although, what the output of this panel will be is not sure. They hope to complete the whole process by February 2011.

In parallel, a Panel has been setup under Dr. S C Gupta, a former member of the Space Commission to solicit views from within ISRO for gearing up for the upcoming space missions. These will be submitted to Chairman, ISRO.

In all, an exhaustive review of all matters pertaining to or related to the GSLV Programme will be carried out. We hope this will help ISRO emerge stronger and hope a re-invented GSLV programme follows. There is still no idea on whether these reports will be made available to the scientific community at large in India and abroad as done by NASA and ESA. The Preliminary Findings have come out in 5 days. This is certainly going to be a strenuous New Year but it will ensure many more happier New Years in the future!

National Conference on Electric Propulsion

2010-12-31T22:29:00.000+05:30

The Liquid Propulsion Systems Centre is hosting the National Conference on Electric Propulsion [PDF]. This is a 2 day conference to be held between 23 and 24 February 2011. Last date of reciept of abstract is January 10, 2011.

India tried entering the electric propulsion age with a station keeping system on GSAT-4 which was lost on the GSLV flight in April, 2010.

Indian Science Congress 2011

2010-12-31T22:19:00.000+05:30

The days are closing for the 98th edition of the Indian Science Congress. This edition is to be held at the SRM University in Chennai. This session is themed "Quality Education and Excellence in Science Research in Indian Universities"

The Prime Minister will address the meet. The highlights are a plenary sesssion on Space by Dr. Radhakrishnan, Dr. Kasturirangan on the next 5 years of science policy making. It also has a session on "Meet the Nobel Laureates".

Madhavan Nair on the GSLV failure

2010-12-31T22:08:00.000+05:30

Madhavan Nair made a comment to IANS that was carried to many news carriers about the GSLV failure. He made some interesting remarks:

'On the day of the failure it was announced the connectors relaying the command led to the rocket's failure. We have revisited and have confirmed that the connectors located between the cryogenic engine and the lower stage (engine) snapped. We have to find why the snapping happened,' Nair said.

'As per the data there are no indications of any control command from the onboard computers to the rocket engines,' he said.

He said simulated experiments will have to be carried out to find out why the connectors got disconnected from the rocket.

'Whether vibrations or external forces led to the snapping of connectors has to be found out. We will have to conduct simulation experiments to find that out,' Nair said.

To a query as to why the ISRO was taking a long time to come out with a preliminary report, he said: 'The preliminary data runs into more than 100 pages even though the flight is of around 50 seconds.'

As written yesterday, the Russians did come out with a report pretty quickly and did another launch after fixing the faulty system on the Proton rocket to give it 12 launches this year - it's record/year since 2000. If India intends to capture the commercial satellite launch market, its system must also be as flexible. On the question of dummy payloads to test launches, Madhavan Nair responds:

On a suggestion of using a dummy payload instead of a real satellite costing around Rs.150 crore till the ISRO stabilises its heavier rocket, Nair said: 'The efforts required for both are more or less the same. However, if the satellite is slung into the orbit then it throws up an opportunity to earn higher revenue.'

I am guessing he is merely being optimistic here. He has spoken about what would happen if the satellite/dummy successfully orbits but there is a loss if it does not.

Establish transparent failure analysis systems

2010-12-31T22:01:00.000+05:30

This article by Devangshu Datta appeared yesterday in the Business Standard. While the whole article is worth a look at, it won't tell you anything new. This point of his is something that I agree with:

The guarantee of future hitches and glitches as Isro forges ahead also means that it needs to put transparent disaster and failure analysis systems in place. The history of space exploration tells us systems can fail despite the most stringent technical safety standards. If those standards are not in place, the future of Indian space exploration could be at stake.

ISRO does put out failure analysis committee summaries but I do not understand why it shies from putting out the entire technical report like ESA or NASA does today.

Rethink rocket shapes

2010-12-31T21:33:00.000+05:30

An important thing that I learnt in 2010 was that rocket shapes don't matter. It does not always have to be the same. There may be other ways the rocket can look.

The HAAS Rocket by ARCA is one of the shapeshifters of that idea.

CIRUS decommissioning

2010-12-31T18:39:00.000+05:30

Tonight engineers working at the Bhaba Atomic Research Centre (BARC) will begin work on decommissioning the 50 year old CIRUS nuclear reactor. CIRUS, short for the (Canada India Research United States) is named thus because it uses a Canada-supplied reactor and US supplied hard water for moderating the nuclear fission process.

On the day of the GSLV launch, I saw a snippet of an interview with eminent nuclear scientist, Raja Ramana on the CIRUS where he talked about how the Canadians thought that India could not develop its own nuclear fuel but which they did. CIRUS also provided the plutonium used for India's first nuclear test in Pokhran in 1974.

No plans to recap 2010

2010-12-31T17:27:00.000+05:30

I have no plans to recap 2010. Better record keeping in 2011 might make this an easier exercise on December 31, 2011.

An alternative stack for India's space programme

2010-12-31T05:31:00.000+05:30

Ever since appearing in this article by Srinivas Laxman, he has teased me as being a Vehicle Director and I do fancy myself as one. The idea of the alternative stack has stuck with me.

Later that day, I was speaking to my rocketeer friend, Hemil Modi from Pune. We were discussing some of the frustrations we were facing in flying rockets in India - amateur rockets. We were also discussing the lack of a NewSpace company in India like SpaceX or at least something in development. We thought that a failure such as GSLV's would not really affect the communication satellites programme and India would have other indigenous alternatives other than the Ariane-5 to fall back on. I commented that this could be some time in the future.

The talk of SpaceX make me go back and look at the recently tested Falcon-9. This rocket developed by SpaceX has tested the capability (and still undergoes tests) of supplying cargo and one day humans to the International Space Station. SpaceX uses the Merlin liquid fuel engine and 9 of them in a single stack. The second stage of the two-staged Falcon-9 uses a modified Merlin that performs in vacuum conditions of space.

My own vehicle stack suggestion is based on this two stage configuration. Under the current conditions, I think ISRO could consider 7 Vikas engines coupled with each other could form a formidable first stage with an indigenous cryogenic engine forming the second stage.

I call this project the ILPX -Indian Liquid Propellant Vehicle Experiment. For starters, I hope to demonstrate liquid propellant recoverable sub-orbital capability. This will use the LOX/RP1 fuel mixture. This does not move into space regimes but demonstrates payload capability. This itself is no small task and I have no idea how I will proceed. The ultimate aim is to provide an alternative medium lift (2-4 tonnes to GTO) reusable capability from India. I think alternatives of this could be used for heavy lift (4-10 tonnes to GTO) reusable capability as well. This would work towards reducing cost of missions to the Moon, asteroids and Mars.

Proton-M incident response

2010-12-30T21:20:00.000+05:30

The Russian space agency, Roscosmos chief Anatoly Perminov has been reprimanded and two top space officials in Roscosmos and Energia Corporation have been fired over the loss of the Proton-M rocket carrying three GLONASS-M satellites into orbit on December 5, 2010.

The launch which took place just about 20 days ago has already finished the investigation and have come up with the cause being that the rocket was loaded with 1-2 tons more fuel than that calculated leading to the launch vehicle veering off course. In addition to fixing the problem, the Proton-M also flew its next mission on December 27, 2010 carrying the 6150 kg KA-SAT.

The speed with which the Russians have responded to the crisis is praiseworthy and also leads to some doubts about Indian claims of taking time to reach root-cause of the failure because of the mountain of data to be considered.

The Large Hadron Collider talk

2010-12-29T05:48:00.000+05:30

Just a note to say that I will be attending the Chai and Why? event this Sunday at Prithvi Theatre. From the event information:

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is creating, in the laboratory, conditions that existed at the beginning of time, to enter a new energy regime and address some of the most fundamental questions of physics. Come find out about the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator and how Indian scientists are participating in this path-breaking project.

About the speaker: Atul Gurtu is currently Senior Professor at TIFR, working in experimental particle physics research, a field that attempts to delve into the nature of the fundamental constituents of matter and the forces between them. He leads a team of six Indian institutions collaborating in one of the front ranking experiments at the LHC, the CMS experiment.

The talk is at 11 am in the morning.

How US missed the Pakistani nuclear programme?

2010-12-29T05:33:00.000+05:30

A non-governmental research institute located in the libraries of George Washington University called the National Security Archives has published documents relating to US-Pakistan relation vis-a-vis the development of nuclear weapons capability. The Press Trust of India reported today that the documents contain revealations about then Indian Prime Minister Morarji Desai's response to a US request of making South Asia nuclear-weapons free.

This has made an interesting foray into nuclear programme before going to the talk by Dr. Yair Evron.

Going back to the temple

2010-12-29T05:30:00.000+05:30

Between the age of 18 and 23, I didn't go to temples off my own accord. I normally tagged along with family. It was during this period that I read Krishnamurthi and Osho. I was also a member of the skeptic gang and was trying to find a scientific way of defining God. In reference to this, at a recent lecture series, Jaydeep Mukherjee said that it was vital that science and religion be kept separate. Do not try to explain science with religion or religion with science.

The ice started breaking on my freeze on visiting temples when I read S Radhakrishnan's book "The Hindu View of Life". I then differentiated between visiting temple for spiritual aims and visiting temple for ritualistic aims. A look back will show you that it is this ritualistic Hinduism that spawned Buddhism and the various reform movements in the 19th century. The spiritual Hinduism is not totally devoid of problems, but it does its best under the circumstances.

It was Krishnamurthi who stressed on living from one moment to another, Osho re-emphasized it and introduced me to Zen Buddhism. My interest in Osho began when I read his critique of Krishnamurthi which was fun. It then went further when I heard the Malayalam film actor, Mohan Lal had "followed" some of his ideas. This turned out later to be not entirely true. It was around this time that my Orkut entry for religion turned from atheist to agnostic.

There are not many places where you get to go and sit alone in some place in India without getting disturbed by a long forgotten relatives (apologies to all such relatives, but you're timing does not help sometimes). I thought the temple would act as a refuge but I have not tried it yet. I have considered the temple, though.

Improved NRSC data delivery time

2010-12-29T05:28:00.000+05:30

National Remote Sensing Centre Director V Jayaraman has told media persons today that the delivery of GIS products from India will now be significantly improved thanks to the development a Multi-Mission Ground Segment in Hyderabad at an estimated cost of 35-40 crore Rupees.

The main thrust of the development is that this will reduce delivery time from 3-4 days to about 12 hours and up to 1 hour in case of emergency. I had commented earlier upon the lack of early data availability in the aftermath of the Mumbai Oil Spill and the Ladakh cloudburst. I think this is a step in the right direction to making information flows faster. This will also make available critical data at the critical moment and not at some later date.

Indian launch schedule for the year 2011

2010-12-29T04:15:00.000+05:30

On December 25, 2010, during the post-GSLV press conference, ISRO Chairman Dr. Radhakrishnan talked about the future launches of 2011. The GSLV now under full review will mean that the next GSLV launch will be in 2012. 2011 hence ends up being a PSLV centric year.

I have decided to compile the launch date announcements into a single page. I will add sources for all future entries.

Post GSLV failure comments

2010-12-29T00:14:00.000+05:30

I have refrained from commenting too much about the GSLV failure after the initial reaction, which was also emotional on my part. This is mainly because there has been a lot of speculation already in various newspapers. This has been caused by the sudden springing up of subject experts by TV and newspapers when they found that they did not get through to any ISRO official on time. They did this only to break the story. I have presented these suggestions to aerospace friends and they say it is too premature to tell the cause of failure.

These are the news stories and videos of the GSLV failure that I read and collected from the web:

This report by Stephen Clark for Spaceflight Now is the sanest report to read.

Hindustan Times has posted this IANS report first on speculation that the heavier payload mass caused the failure. There are mirrors of this report in Economic Times and DNA.

This report by Nirad Mudur of DNA speculates whether this was an ISRO goof up i.e. oversight error.

This report by Charu Sudan Kasthuri of the Hindustan Times on ISRO's clarification that they will use the GSLV Mk-II vehicle for Chandrayaan-II.

This report by T S Subramanium of The Hindu suggests that the failure of connectors is a very trivial problem.

Pathri Rajashekhar of The Asian Age reports suggest that it is the workers fault that the accident occured.

Another report by T S Subramanium of The Hindu. I give kudos to him to have the presence of mind to question the VSSC Director. VSSC is the centre which builds India's launch vehicles.

In short, these so called "space experts" have criticised everything that was new on this spacecraft. I think the best way for ISRO to correct its mistake is to follow the engineering creed and not bow down to immediate needs of media houses, political party or a short-memoried public. I hope ISRO officials can thrash down the problems.

I would also apologise for my own speculation in the previous post. But, I still think ISRO should nonetheless put the launch stack through re-qualification and test them again. It does not hurt.

GSLV-F06 flight unsuccessful

2010-12-26T17:55:00.000+05:30

The seventh flight of the Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV) designated F06 ended when the launch vehicle was destroyed by a manual self-destruct button activated by the Range Safety Officer. The destruct button was used when the first stage suffered a "technical glitch" and the vehicle started veering off its designated path.

At a press conference, ISRO Chairman Dr. Radhakrishnan explained:

Its performance was normal for 50 seconds after the lift-off. “Soon afterwards, the vehicle's attitude was increasing, leading to heavier structural loads, higher angle of attack and breaking up of the vehicle.” The Range Safety Officer in the Mission Control Centre gave the ‘destruct' command to the vehicle 63 seconds after the lift-off from its second launch pad and it was destroyed.

Although I told Srinivas Laxman and am quoted as saying that I would want the whole vehicle to undergo testing again, VSSC Director P S Veeraraghavan said that the fundamental vehicle design was good and it was possibly the connector snapping that caused the mission failure. I would say such a comment is still premature. We should still wait for the Analysis Report to come out before making comments. Radhakrishnan is quoted as saying in the same article that the entire GSLV programme will be reviewed.

Prof U R Rao, former ISRO Chairman commented in the Times of India that the programmes such as Chandrayaan-II and Human Spaceflight will not be affected since they are different vehicles, perhaps alluding to the fact that GSLV Mk-III may be used for these.

I believe that ISRO must work on a different stack for the 2 - 6 tonne class satellite launch vehicles. Perhaps, a downgraded version of GSLV Mk-III architecture can be used or a 4-stage GSLV are can be used for this class of launch vehicles. Two failures in six months does not provide sufficient confidence in trusting the vehicle with precious cargoes such as Chandrayaan-II or humans. That, or the whole configuration must be tested again. This may cost more money but it is much better than loosing payloads to accidents.

I am really confident with the scientists and their work in ISRO but this should also encourage them to encourage budding rocketeers in the country. Fields like amateur rocketry will give them a large and experienced talent pool of do-ers who can then easily be upgraded to scientists working on Indian launch vehicles programme. ISRO has done service by encouraging the next generation of satellite engineers through work at nano and cube satellites.

Spaceflight Now cleared some of the doubts I had about how a 12.5 tonne engine could be made to accomodate 15.3 tonnes of cryogenic fuel in the third cryogenic stage:

GSAT 5P's weight forced Russian and Indian engineers to modify parts of the rocket to lift the satellite, which is the heaviest spacecraft ever orbited by ISRO. The Russian third stage was lengthened 3.6 feet to fit an extra 6,000 pounds of propellant inside. The additional cryogenic hydrogen and oxygen was designed to permit the upper stage engine to burn about two minutes longer than on previous flights.

It is this sort of attention-to-detail that was missing in Indian media. They also continually said that the Indian satellite exploded, referred to the weight of the GSAT-5P as 2130 kg instead of 2310 kg and repeatedly called "scientists" space experts. Many of the said space experts were also forced to comment on a situation without much data being made available and were then sensationalized as banner and news ticker stories.

It is also now clear that the helium gas leak was fixed rather than found to be within acceptable risk limits. It is also wrong to claim that it was the Russian cryogenic engine which caused trouble and that ISRO should have checked it as was ripe in the initial minutes after the scenes of disaster played itself out on television screens. It is easier to blame and much difficult to fix. As Prof. Rao says there is a huge amount of data needs to be checked to identify all the various points that seem to/could or have failed.

GSLV-F06 launch on Dec 25, 2010

2010-12-24T17:53:00.000+05:30

On Christmas Day, India will launch its GSLV-F06 with GSAT-5P satellite on board. Since December 20, 2010 when the delay in the launch was announced, ISRO has been working with Russian engineers by conducting several tests on the leaked valve in the Russian cryogenic engine.

It has now been ascertained that the launch could go on. It is still not sure if the leak was fixed or whether it was found whether the leak was within acceptable limits. ISRO has just posted a note on its website saying the launch has started.

There have been several mis-leading reports in Western blogs stating that this is the Indian cryogenic engine. This is wrong. This is one of the two spare engines that ISRO obtained from Russia.

The 2310 kg GSAT-5P is the heaviest satellite that an Indian launch vehicle will carry. Hence the cryogenic engine has been uprated. It now carries 15.3 tonnes of fuel as against 12.5 tonnes and has a payload fairing diameter of 4 metres instead of 2.8 metres. This uprating enables the GSLV Mk-I to carry 2310 kg instead of the 1900 kg capability. GSAT-5P itself is to replace INSAT-2E's services and upgrade television, tele-medicene, tele-education and telephony services.

Talk by Dr. Yair Evron

2010-12-24T04:57:00.000+05:30

Today was my second visit to the offices of the Observer Research Foundation. I went down to their offices to attend the talk delivered by Dr. Yair Evron. His talk was about Iran's rise as a nuclear power and possible Israeli reaction to it.

[caption id="attachment_826" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Banner during the talk. Image Credit: Pradeep Mohandas"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_827" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Image of Iran's nuclear facilities. Image Credit: Pradeep Mohandas"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_828" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Dr. Yair Evron during his talk. Image Credit: Pradeep Mohandas"][/caption]

He began his talk by describing the Israeli Nuclear Programme, which according to Israel does not exist. It is believed to have been developed in the 1950s and was completely developed by the end of the 1960s. It's primary reason to go nuclear was as deterrent to stop war with the Arab world. He said that Israel was under tremendous pressure from America not to go nuclear. As a result, it has what is called an ambiguous posture under which it does not admit that it possess nuclear weapons. There are international reports to the contrary.

He said Israel was a responsible nuclear power since it had not made use of nuclear weapons during instances such as the 1973 war and also not used as a coercive tool in political negotiations (which he admits has not worked as a negotiation tactic). He states that Israel had good relations with Iran till 1979. This continued until the Revolution there.

After 1979, relations between Israel and Iran have been hostile. This is mainly because of ideological differences and because of change in political leadership that Iran wanted show to stand against Israel like Jordan and neighbouring Arab countries did.

Evron says that the development of Iranian nuclear capability began after the Iran-Iraq war. It provided reasons such as deterrence against Iraq, USA, Israel and the Soviet Union (who had occupied Iran during the World War and these wounds are fresh in Iranian minds). The first exposure of Iranian nuclear programme happened in 1991 Gulf War. Evron made it clear here that he did not believe in the minimum deterrent theory. He also states that the Wikileaks expose of the Arab request to attack Iran also shows that the Arab countries were equally worried of the impact of Iran going nuclear as Israel was.

The facility for nuclear weapons by Iran began development in the 1990s and this was exposed in 2002. In this case, Iran had violated the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to which Iran is a signatory. In 2008, a second nuclear enrichment facility had been exposed. Iran is also believed to have been developing missile systems with nuclear capability. This, he admits is tricky and difficult technology to master. Currently, Evron claims Iran has sufficient uranium for 2 bombs although not weapons grade. Iran currently has, Evron says, nuclear material with a purity of 3.5% to 20% whereas a weapons platform would need 93% Uranium. These are the developments under its Uranium enrichment technique. Iran has also begun working on the plutonium enrichment route.

Evron says that since 2005, Iran has been actively working on an advanced enrichment programme, a weapons programme and developing warheads for missiles.

Commenting a bit on Obama's current policy on negotiation and economic pressure through sanctions, it says it might work and is a better option than that presented during the Bush administration which wasted a great chance when Iran offered unconditional negotiations in 2003. Evron says that Israel and Iran might have a relationship if Iran goes nuclear.

Evron says that for a stable relationship to take place between a nuclear Iran and Israel, both will have to understand and be mature about the use of nuclear weapons and must be in continuous dialogue with each other. If Iran goes nuclear, he foresees that the Middle East would become unstable since the Arab world could also begin to look for nuclear weapons for deterrence. This could be further used by groups such as the Hezbollah and Hamas to cause what is known as "catalytic war" - provoking countries to take nuclear action. Evron says that dialogue would only become more important if Iran goes nuclear.

Ending his talk, Evron says that the Universities in Iran had free intellectuals till last year who were ready to talk with an Israeli such as him. He says though things have changed in the past one year where they have gotten a bit scared about talking openly. He says civil society in Iran wants regime change and that Israel and the Arab world would accept a moderate Iran.

During the Question and Answer session, he went into details on certain aspects. If Iran were about to go nuclear, he said, he would advise that the US consider the military option against it. Israel taking such actions would have other repercussions in the region. He said the US could perform surgical strikes of Iranian nuclear weapons installations and declare that this was done purely to protect the region. Such an action would not cause Iran to retaliate other than to bad mouth US imperialism and such. He said that if Iran tried responding militarily, the US air force could destroy the Iranian military in a couple of weeks.

Chandrayaan-II: Recent updates

2010-12-22T05:52:00.000+05:30

Over November and December, Anatoly Zak's website RussianSpaceWeb has been updating information about Luna-Resurs. Luna-Resurs is the Russian name given to Chandrayaan-II.

As per a December 8, 2010 report on RussianSpaceWeb (which has translation from the NPO Lavochkin website) states that the team has defended improvements in Luna-Resurs mission. They seem to have finalised the payloads, the navigation and ballistic issues. It seems these improvements have been approved.

[caption id="attachment_818" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Kaguya image marked with probable Chandrayaan-II Landing sites. Image Credit: RussianSpaceWeb.com"][/caption]

Another is on the selection of two landing sites for Chandrayaan-II. The report is based on a paper by E N Salyuta and others presented at the 41st Lunar and Planetary Conference in March 2010! The selection was aided by results from American and Japanese spacecrafts - Lunar Reconnaisance Orbiter (LRO) and Kaguya. The page provides background on the 2 sites selected from the 14 original based on criteria such as landing safety, scientific interest, constant line of communication etc. The main landing site is near the Shoemaker and Faustini craters located at 87.2 degrees South and 68 degrees East lunar co-ordinates. The backup landing site is near the de Gerlach crater located 88.5 degrees South and 297 degrees East lunar co-ordinates.

The above work seems to be purely Russian. I am not sure if ISRO has yet been consulted on the project but the lander being a Russian component, the landing may also be of their choosing. The reference to the Indian rover as only a political payload was unnecessary. They said that about MIP on Chandrayaan-I in 2007, if I recollect. Maybe its for good luck.

Blogcamp Mumbai - Moodi 2010

2010-12-20T16:27:00.000+05:30

I attended my second blogcamp today. Both have been in the School of Management building in the IIT-B campus. I reached here super-early and so managed to catch up on some of my reading (Ruskin Bond's The Book of Nature). There seemed to be a strong creative vibe in the camp - especially with speakers on reviewing movies, doodling and fiction or with people who meddled in them. Hence, overall I enjoyed the whole experience.

Image: The introductions session during Blogcamp. Image Credit: Pradeep Mohandas

Image: Meeta Kabra during her talk. Image Credit: Pradeep Mohandas

The morning began with a session by Meeta Kabra, who wrote movie reviews on Wogma.com. Meeta began with sympathizing with today's creators for receiving one word reactions for their work. She said reviewers must take the effort to provide constructive criticism of the work so that there is a possibility for the creators to learn and improve. The audience thought that maybe not everyone would understand the nuisances of cinema (Meeta reviews films) to provide such criticism and hence the restricted reactions. Meeta then asked for advice on how to handle abusive commenters. The general consensus seems to be that these be not posted at all. Some schools of thought believed that these comments may not be removed but should not be answered. Certain comment moderation was encouraged through various tools by the attendees.

Image: Harpreet Singh during his talk. Image credit: Pradeep Mohandas

The second session of the morning was done by Harpreet Singh on sketching experiences. He blogs at sketchingexperiences.me. He started off with his aim to get at least 5 members of the audience into sketching by the end of his talk. He was of the opinion that diagrams and drawings were catching the eye of people in this era of information overload. These were simple and easy to understand in a single glimpse as against reading pages of text on some topic. I am not overtly enthusiastic of diagrams but do believe that it has its usefulness.

Image: John Matthew during his talk. Image Credit: Pradeep Mohandas

The next session of the day was by John P. Matthew who writes a personal blog. From an end of the day perspective, John's session seemed to be presenting ideas that didn't seem to sit well with the audience. He began by speaking about Google PageRanks and blog monetization to an extent. He then spoke of his experience of using the blog for activism and having used his blog to make money and also make good friends. His school of thought urged people to take blogging as a serious activity and blog at a daily pace. This pushed some of the members of the audience to ask the question of quality suffering because of quality. The result seem to be mixed with people calling for differing rates of blog posts. I, personally do not set any particular target for the number of blog posts per day. That's just too much discipline for me.

Image: Tarun Chandel during his talk. Image Credit: Pradeep Mohandas

The next session by Tarun Chandel, now a photoblogger, seemed to contrast well with John's session before. His talk basically asked the blogger to begin the blog for a purpose. He stressed that by "walking that extra mile" while writing a blog post or posting a picture or the cartoon/diagram makes a difference. He believes that having a good workflow, a well thought out structure works better for the blogger. He says these are worth the time and the effort because one adds his name to the blog post. Commenting on the trend of multiple platforms available for content, he suggested their wise use. I particularly enjoyed Tarun's talk because it seemed like a return to the roots in this time of confusion in the world of media today. I was also meeting Tarun for the first time after the last blogcamp, which is when I last met him.

Image: Srinivas during his session. Image Credit: Pradeep Mohandas

The next session, post a small drinks break was by Srinivas, a travel blogger on #SrinionTour. Srinivas has the idea of going around South India on a shoestring budget of 10,000. He hopes to visit 19 locations in 15 days. He hopes to create a buzz around his trip by using social media. I am guessing it is do-able and connectivity is improving in South India. Srinivas' trip would be the real test, of course. I have started following him both on twitter and on his blog.

Image: Sonesh Prakash during his talk. Image Credit: Pradeep Mohandas

Sonesh Prakash spoke next on his comic strip. Oddly enough he used Facebook Notes for the same. This is odd to me because I differentiate between a blog and a social network. He is the creator of the comic strip that has two characters - SoBo chick and Suburban guy and uses them to generate a comic strip to comment on various issues. He demoed two tools - StripCreator and Pixton. Interestingly, he then moved on to his trips to Sikkim and Kerala and shared pics from there. He came across as a very curious person to me, in a rather good way.

Image: Aniket during his talk. Image Credit: Pradeep Mohandas

The next session was by Aniket who blogs at flashfiction.in. He began by talking of how he began a multiple author website on writing fiction, short stories and poetry. He clarified for me the idea behind syllables in poetry. He further spoke about how he started his multiple author website and some of the friendships he has made through blogging. He seems to be talented with his voice as well as he was asked to introduce in multiple voices!

Image: Sampath Iyengar during his talk. Image Credit: Pradeep Mohandas

The next session was by Sampath Iyengar who is a corporate blogger. His session was built on a series of questions to the blogging community. The answers he recieved urged him to separate the corporate and personal identity blogs. He was urged to use plugins to pull content from blog to Facebook. Tarun, answering his question expanded on his comment on wise use of platforms. He suggested that social websites like Facebook are liable to change as was the case with Orkut and there was also an unclear copyright protection problem while using such platforms. Whereas, on your hosted server, the content remained with you, by and large.

Image: Harish Iyer during his talk. Image Credit: Pradeep Mohandas
Harish Iyer spoke next on using blogging to encourage activism. He worked primarily in the area of raising awareness about sexuality and child sex abuse, having been subjected to the same himself. He is openly gay and has spoken about these issues in open fora. He states that his humorous attitude towards this has helped him handle society's reactions to his sexual preference while also being able to talk about such a taboo subject. He also allows Chandini the use of his blog to connect people with the resources with the people in need. I am a little bit confused since she also seems to have her own posterous for this. She also spams (forwards emails but she uses spam as a smaller word for this) people to get this done.

Image: Manoj during his talk. Image Credit: Pradeep Mohandas
Manoj was the last speaker of the day. He spoke of how he got into blogging after being bored by the assignments offered by media houses. He also talked about his experience of going around the country during the 2009 Lok Sabha elections raising awareness about social causes and the various NGOs working for them. His latest effort is called Canary Trap, where he hopes to provide access to documents which are only stated in the media but one never gets to see in print.

After lunch, Moksh Juneja opened the floor for discussion on the monetization of blogs and some of the "ethical" practices that could be used for such monetization. The question was whether or not to provide a realistic review of a product/book/anything if paid. The consensus seems to be to ask upfront the type of request the company providing such an offer is making. Some members of the audience also thought a disclaimer would help decision making. Moksh managed to put me in a delicate spot by asking why it was so difficult to get a Wikipedian to create content for money. To me, it seemed odd that people would pay money to people when they could edit it themselves and also the fact that Wikipedia patrol would quite easily catch such instances. All I could manage was something on Wikipedia edit principles and to answer "no" when he asked whether I would edit an article if provided with all resources required to make a Wikipedia article (note: this would not make it a good Wikipedia article). The conversation then veered towards the blurring lines between journalism and blogging. Members of the audience shared pointers on how to select content in an era of perceived mis-trust in main stream media.

I was not able to live-tweet the event after a point because of both lazy battery charge and poor network availability. My thank you to the organizers for putting up a great event!

GSLV-F06 launch postponed

2010-12-20T07:00:00.000+05:30

I only got around to writing this now after a day of BlogCamp:

The launch of GSLV-F06 with GSAT-5P Satellite onboard, scheduled for December 20, 2010 has been postponed due to a minor leak in one of the valves of the Russian Cryogenic stage, observed during the pre-countdown checks.

The 29-hours countdown sequence planned to commence at 1100 hrs today (Dec 19th ) has not been authorized by the Launch Authorisation Board that met this forenoon to review the results of pre-countdown checks.

The revised schedule for launch will be firmed up after ascertaining the cause for the leak, remedial actions and due verifications.

Well, hope they get to fix the problem as soon as they can. Checks are carried out before the launch to ensure that all systems work perfectly. Minor defects are not tolerated since its failure can lead to the failure of the whole system. Will keep you posted on the developments of this GSLV flight.

What happened to STUDSAT-1?

2010-12-19T13:30:00.000+05:30

I had met with the team of STUDSAT-1, India's second student satellite last September. Here, they had spoken of an attempt to get back control of their student satellite, STUDSAT-1. Last week, the NanoSail-D mission reminded Daniel Fischer about STUDSAT-1 and asked me about the satellite. I sent an email to Prithviraj and Chetan. Prithviraj has emailed yesterday to inform me that the satellite is dead. In his own words:

We had planned to collaborate with ISTRAC to upcommand to StudSat-1 when the cone of window again comes over Bangalore. But then before the satellite also stopped sending the beacon signal and so the satellite died.

The students will now send a close-up report to ISRO. ISRO has told students that the mission will be considered a partial success and they are awaiting a written reply from ISRO. On the future they had this to say on STUDSAT-2:

We have started working on StudSat-2. The initial collaboration between the colleges is done and we have recruited lots of students from the 6 colleges. The concept design of the two satellites is almost frozen. Once its finalized the MoU with ISRO will be done.

Wishing the students best of luck for the STUDSAT-2 project.

GSLV-F06 launching the GSAT-5P on December 20

2010-12-16T16:05:00.000+05:30

I had earlier written about the possible launch date of GSAT-5P as being December 20. This is now confirmed. Yesterday, ISRO posted photos and descriptions [PDF] about the GSLV-F06 and the GSAT-5P.

A little bit on the satellite. Unlike the satellite it is replacing, the GSAT-5P is a pure communications satellite. It does not have the meteorological payload that INSAT-2E had. The 2310 kg satellite will be placed in a geosynchronous transfer orbit by the GSLV-F06. The satellite with its C-band transponders will provide continuity of telecommunication services.

The importance of this launch is not because of its payload but rather because of its launch vehicle. The Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV) is a completely new launch vehicle unlike the PSLV, which has now been tried and tested over the years. It is tasked with launching 2-4 tonne class satellites that the PSLV is not designed to handle. The problems facing the programme have been faced by other rockets in its class and are not un-precedented. However, it has been worrying ISRO because it has impacted ISRO's strive for self-reliant systems. The delay will cause India to fall back on support on Astrium's Ariane launch vehicles.

For the technical personnel, such times are uncomfortable. Questions are raised on the personnel's capability by the management and it is a difficult time for all concerned. However, this is how people learn in rocketry and science. In a recent interview, I was informed that the way the Sriharikota spaceport works right now it is capable of doing only 3-4 launches per year. ISRO has been working to improve this launch rate with its Chairman making the claim in early 2010 that they hoped to do 10launches this year. The same claims have been carried forward to 2011. I wonder if this has impacted ISRO's ability to test the rocket without a payload or with dummy payloads like SpaceX did. I had raised this question earlier as well when ISRO's GSLV with indigenous cryogenic engine failed and fell into the Bay with its payload.

GSLV is a machine with contributions from many people each one providing critical components. The failure of even one component amongst the bunch can lead to the catastrophic results. Before this launch, I have depressed myself a little. I hope and pray for the team of GSLV-F06. Godspeed!

Western India Science Fair 2010

2010-12-16T06:00:00.000+05:30

The better part of today morning and early afternoon was spent at the Nehru Science Centre, Worli attending the Western India Science Fair. Now, in its 23rd edition, the fair has been conducted every year in Mumbai. This is one of the few opportunities that students do get to show off their talent in hands-on projects. As for the student projects, I saw that students have picked up on themes relevant to today - anti-terrorism, renewable energy, waste management and agriculture.

The guests did walk into the hall a full 40 minutes late. The inauguration began with an opening by Anil Manekar. He spoke about the Fair being a great platform for students to showcase their creativity and also learn the important task of science communication, by communicating their theoretical and practical understanding of science to the visiting members of the public. This, he stressed was vital and was the need of the hour.

We then learnt that the 2009 edition of the fair saw 120 thousand visitors to the Fair.

The Chief Guest of the evening [thanks to Srinivas for correcting me] was Dr. H C Pradhan of the Homi Bhaba Centre for Science Education. I have made his acquaintance as a higher secondary student when I wrote the Physics Olympiad. I visited his offices (he was Assistant Director then) on the recommendation of my late Professor Prasad Iyer (in Mathematics) of Atomic Energy Junior College. He was really helpful at that time and he is still as humble and soft spoken today. He shared with students who he said were "really good with their hands" avenues such as the Olympiads and the Intel Fair. For the teachers in the audience, he also went into some detail on teaching and its modern forms. He said that project based learning was now believed to be better than Teacher based learning. He said that learning and hence the student had become more important than teaching and hence the teacher's job was now to provide more opportunities to the student for learning. He told them that the next step is likely to be peer-to-peer learning. He urged the participants to go home and share their experiences with fellow students in their schools and in their neighborhoods.

Of all the student projects that I witnessed, I enjoyed one on rain water harvesting, one on testing water for faecal contamination using a Rs. 24 Hydrogen Sulphide strip, one on aqua robotic reconnaissance system (based partly on 26/11 terrorist strikes), one on Maglev trains (the fascinating thing about this was that they used their Nokia mobile phone battery to power the model :) ), one on robotic excavation system (based on recent news of the Chile miners), an elaborate satellite-assisted coastal monitoring system (based on 26/11 terrorist strike), a system for converting plastic waste to useful substances like wax, fuel etc.

There was even a section for educators on some of the interesting ways they taught to science to students. Didn't spend much time here as I was hungry :).

I have uploaded the images above. You can find them here if the above slideshow does not work for you.

Insect Photography

2010-12-14T23:09:00.000+05:30

A bountiful monsoon this year meant that our home was visited by a wide variety of animals and insects this year. We spotted insects, parrots, squirrels, monkeys and strange birds. I photographed a few of them and present them below:

These insects landed on my desk with alarming frequency. I just got tired of them and shut them off.

GSAT-5P to be launched on December 20, 2010

2010-12-13T20:18:00.000+05:30

On December 20, 2010, India will replace the ageing INSAT-2E communications satellite. The satellite has served India since 1999 by providing telecommunication, television broadcasting and meteorological services.

The launch of GSAT-5P which is to take place from Sriharikota will use the Russian cryogenic engine for the third stage of the GSLV. Hence, this is designated as the GSLV Mk-I. The vehicle is already on the launch pad and was moved there and anchored on Sunday. Last week, the satellite, GSAT-5P was placed inside the heat shield.

The significant events before launch between 4 and 4:30 pm 5:30 pm on December 20, include a full systems check today, followed by a launch rehersal without the liquid and cryogenic fuel on December 17.

There has only been one successful PSLV and one failed GSLV that has taken place this year in Sriharikota this year. I am guessing scientists will be anxious to get this launch right. This is another reason why the spotlight is falling back on this launch. The GSLV has been a programme with mixed results with 3 successes and 3 failures.

Once ISRO updates its website with more information I will carry more detailed article on the subject here.

[This post is based on this news report.]

Wikipedia Mumbai Meetup 5

2010-12-12T06:59:00.000+05:30

Update: Having written this at 1 am in the morning, I missed out on some facts related to the discussion towards the end of the meeting. I have now added this along with a processed pictures from the meeting.

Today was the 5th meetup of Mumbai Wikipedians. The main idea behind the meetup was to enable Erik Möller, Danese Cooper and Alolita Sharma of the Wikimedia Foundation to meet with Mumbai Wikipedians and discuss some of the technical issues faced by Indian Wikipedians. The meetup was held at the Homi Bhaba Centre for Science Education Campus in Anushakti Nagar, Mumbai. The meeting began with a basic introduction of Wikipedia, an attempt to understand the Indic text input issues, local caches, a few Wikipedia-based projects to try and explain similar possible Indian collaborations and technical issues. The meeting was attended by 10-20 people but was very engaging and exciting!

The meeting started at 6:30 pm and went all the way upto 9 pm at night. It began with a round of tea, coffee and biscuits. After tea, we moved in to a lecture hall on the ground floor of the campus. Erik began the talk by a brief introduction of Wikipedia and the work of the Wikimedia Foundation. We then got some insights into how the Foundation ran Wikipedia on top of just 450 servers with a low budget compared to that of giants like Google and Facebook. The trend seemed pretty counter-intuitive. Erik reiterated the points made by both Barry Newstead and Jimmy Wales on their previous visits on why they have considered India an important destination. He added that much of the traffic from India was going to the English Wikipedia.

Erik then went on to question the Mumbai Wikipedians on the various input options available to them on the Hindi Wikipedia. Kundan Amitabh being the expert in such matters was urged to demonstrate the inscript keyboard technique that he had shared in the last meetup. Erik asked about the in-built transliteration tool as well as the one provided by Google for purposes of editing. Moksh Juneja was of the opinion that while the phonetic (transliteration) tools were useful for small edits, the larger edits required the inscript keyboard method. Nagarjuna G suggested that during his workshops, he suggested the use of inscript keyboard to those who were going to learn from the beginning and the phonetic tool to those who were used to English keyboards. He too agreed, though, that in the long run, the inscript keyboards being the standard was more preferable.

Moving on, Erik suggested the Wikipedia Bookshelf as the go-to place for various resources on Wikipedia. He showed the various resources available on the page for beginners and hoped it could be printed and localized. Towards the end of the meetup, Nagarjuna G selected Moksh Juneja and Vivek Cherian to begin the localizing effort. Erik also pointed to examples such as the US Public Policy Initiative and a reference for school and college education projects based on Wikipedia that he started. The reference grew to act as a set of resources that school and college educators could use.

Danese Cooper (I incidentally tweeted her name as Denise, apologies for that) then took on the technical side of Wikipedia. I could not really catch onto some of the technical details she mentioned and hope that Vivek Cherian will catch on to this on his blog. I will link to his post here. The interesting things that I could make out from the talk was that a sum total of 4 people of her 60-member group worked on keeping Wikipedia up and running. She also mentioned a need for a sysops from Asia who could take the timeframe between her people in Europe and Australia. She said that their current data center dated back to the ones used by Jimmy Wales and that they hope to soon move datacenter to Ashburn, Virginia being a datacenter hub. She suggested that those interested in the technical aspects join up on the wikitech mailing list. A list of all Wikipedia related mailing lists is available here.

We then moved on to watching some of the videos created by Wikipedians at Wikimania 2010. These were created with the basic idea of getting people interested in Wikipedia and encouraging them to edit Wikipedia. They also pointed us to some of the screencast tutorials that would help Indian wikipedians create local content that would enable us to use this as an education tool. Again, Wikipedia Bookshelf has resources to help Wikipedians create video content.

Erik then showed us the "Create a book" tool which can be found under "Print/Export" on the sidebar. The tool allows us to select pages from around Wikipedia and add them as pages into a book. These can then be routed through PediaPress, which prints out the copy of a book from near your locality or exported to an offline open source reader such as Kiwix.

Erik then showed how the Encyclopedia of Life project worked. He also talked about some of the work that the Foundation was doing to enable some of the expert comments to be made available to the wikipedia article as a way of giving back. He suggested ideas like a tab on top of a page for pointing to reviews about the content of a page by an expert on EoL.

Moving on to the question and answer session, Shambulingayya asked the question of institutional collaboration with IIT-B and Wikimedia Foundation, India. The idea was welcomed. Kundan also suggested that this can be used to the advantage of improving articles on science and technology on Wikipedia. I also welcomed it. Danese provided a similar example of such a collaboration started by Wikipedian Liam Wyatt who used his passion for Wikipedia and Museums to bring about an interesting project with the British Museum. Erik added that a session called Backstage Pass enabled Wikipedians to visit the Museum for one day, then meet in a room and work on adding content to Wikipedia and sufficiently improved the article to best article status. The British Museum went along with the project seemingly because it received more traffic from sites like Wikipedia. This was leveraged by Wyatt to improve Wikipedia itself allowing the Museum website to get more attention.

Erik then showed off the openmoko WikiReader. This little gadget has an offline, low power utilisation, microSD card content of Wikipedia running on AAA batteries. The latest copy of wikipedia can be downloaded by removing the SD card and connecting it with internet. Erik asked for suggestions on how this could device could be useful in the Indian context. He also suggested that these could be locally produced at a lower cost since this had an open hardware architecture. In connection to small readers, Moksh asked about mobile accessibility. Danese pointed to the mobile version of wikipedia and confessed they did not know where to concentrate their efforts on for developing on mobile devices. She speculated on the growth of smart phones in India and said they were not sure whether to put in the effort to make Wikipedia readable on currently simple GPRS phones if the smart phones market would have cheaper alternatives available.

The end of the meetup quiz was won by Shambulingayya who got the copy of the book, Good Faith Collaboration. We then had a photo-op and moved out as night descended.

We had planned on the 10th anniversary celebration of Wikipedia. I, Moksh and Kundan have been requested to meet and discuss things once again and post the idea on the mailing list to take forward the idea of the Wikipedia X Celebrations in Mumbai. Vivek also jumped in with better ideas on the way back home for which Moksh gave us a ride. We hope to get some ideas and put it on the Wikipedia in Mumbai mailing list.

My photos from the event can be found at Wikimedia Commons. I will soon upload them onto Picasa and share them here.

I just missed out on sharing this as I was writing this very early this morning at 1:30 am. Nagarjuna G shared that they were currently working in HBCSE to digitize copies of Marathi Vishwakosh. He had already written to the Secretary of the digitization project to make the copies available under the Creative Commons License and in unicode text. This would enable Wikipedians to use this as a base for several articles on Wikipedia in Marathi. As an answer, Bishaka Datta shared that in speaking with the Observer Research Foundation had made some headway and a suggestion to do the same could be made with the Chief Minister of Maharashtra.

Book Review: Known Turf by Annie Zaidi

2010-12-10T20:41:00.000+05:30

I finished reading this book way back in August but did not get around to writing a review for it. I bought this book after seeing Joseph Thomas' note. By the time he reviewed it his opinion had changed a bit. Just shows you how long ago that was.

I have read Annie Zaidi's articles when she was in Frontline but not her blog. The book, though is mostly about her first foray into journalism and her beat visiting goondas in Northern India and the strange aura that surrounded them. She moves from understanding what moves these people from goondaism to what generally is lacking in provisions provided by the Government and moves towards human interest stories.

One of my favourite parts is where she talks about an Indian's love for tea. I share this love but have started limiting my consumption of this liquid slowly. It is very difficult. She then moves to her blogging life and her work with the Blank Noise project.

Sadly, after this I have started going more towards music. Exams in between meant that this transitition was not as smooth as it could have been.

Falcon 9 and Akatsuki link-bunch

2010-12-10T15:42:00.000+05:30

I have not added any information on two huge publicity events, the launch of SpaceX's Falcon-9 with Dragon and the Venus orbital injection failure of Akatsuki. This is because there has been plenty of good coverage on each subject in the blogosphere that I will only be happy to link to.

Akatsuki

Daniel Fischer's Cosmic Mirror has a link bunch on Akatsuki with news and blog stories. Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society blog has the best coverage on the subject - here, here and here (in reverse chronology). There was a rather long pause before the failure became apparent. There was a huge rush on twitter and elsewhere to learn of what had happened to the spacecraft. Emily had made use of twitter's Japanese users to translate into English some of the information which was released in Japanese first. JAXA, Japan's space agency will now carefully check the spacecraft health and thrusters before deciding what they plan to do with the spacecraft and whether it will survive the 6 years before it is in a position to try Venus orbit injection again.

Below is the video posted to YouTube by Emily Lakdawalla on how Akatsuki would meet Venus again after 6 years:

Falcon 9

As the news of Akatsuki's failed orbit injection spread through the English-speaking world, Space X began preparations for its launch. William Pomerantz on The Launch Pad does the best blog on this subject here. The launch is seen below:

This one was strange. The first launch aborted while I was about to board the bus after the talk at Nehru Planetarium. The launch occured when I got off at the bus stop near my home. The P-POD release announcement came after my dinner and SPLASHDOWN! of the Dragon capsule in the Pacific was when I was ready to go to sleep. Odd timing!

Talk by Jaydeep Mukherjee on Space-Time Telescopes

2010-12-09T05:02:00.000+05:30

Last week, it was my friend Srinivas who informed me that Jaydeep Mukherjee would be delivering a talk at Nehru Planetarium. I had missed his talk the last time although I had the chance to meet him at his home. The talk was held today at Nehru Centre. During his talk, Jaydeep dealt with some basic astrophysics, Einstein's concept of Space-Time and about some of the current and future NASA-funded telescopes.

[caption id="attachment_764" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Jaydeep Mukherjee Image Credit: Pradeep Mohandas"][/caption]

After a brief introduction by Planetarium Directior Piyush Pandey on the Astronomy Lecture Series and Dr. Jaydeep Mukherjee, the talk began in earnest. He began with the Big Bang and corrected that the Big Bang was not really an explosion, a common misconception created by the terminology used. He stressed on the point again and again throughout his talk and also in the Question and Answer session. He talks about the first light from 400,000 years after the Big Bang when the stars first began to appear and right upto the present epoch. He uses images from Hubble to demonstrate that we look back into time using a telescope and so really these are time machines.

He began the description of telescopes with the famous Hubble Space Telescope went on to the SWIFT telescope and WMAP. He then stayed a bit on Chandra X-Ray Telescope (perhaps because it was its 10th anniversary and Chandrasekhar's birth centenary). He explained using two examples of a supernova remanant and a galaxy about how Chandra turned our understanding of the hidden mechanisms in these. For the supernova remnant, he selected the famous Crab Nebula which was seen as a supernovae in 1054 AD. His slide mentioned that the supernovae was seen by Chinese and European astronomers. Wikipedia says Arab instead of Europeans. He showed how observations from Chandra helped in understanding the remnant's structure. For the galaxy, he took a recent example of a galactic cannibalism and explained how Chandra added another dimension to the picture and revealed the inner structure.

He then moved on to the James Webb Space Telescope, the Hubble-successor as it is famously known as. He explained how the funding scenario in the United States of America meant that the Telescope would be further delayed than the 2014 year he mentioned on his slide. He also explained why there could be cost overruns in the mission. His analogy involved the house redecoration and how a new item found during the process could add to the cost as the process evolved.

He then moved to space time and gave us a simplistic idea of what Space-Time was. He then followed it up with the Gravity Probe B mission. The mission wanted to try and test Einstein's explanation of curving of space-time curve as gravity. They did this with very highly precise gyroscopes (which Jaydeep stressed took about 40 years in development) that tested narrow changes in angular position. This change in position would not be seen if we accept Newton's concept of gravity. But, changing angles showed that Einstein's explanation of gravity was correct. I have over-simplified it here for brevity. If you are curious, you can find out about this here.

He then introduced us to a second mission, LISA. The idea behind LISA is to check for gravitational waves. To shorten, Jaydeep's slide which compared electromagnetic and gravitational waves, gravitational waves move masses and electromagnetic waves move charges. LISA hopes to detect this movement in masses. This effect is so small that there needs to be three spacecrafts spaced a 5 million kms from each other in a triangular formation if there is to be hope of detecting these waves. In the Question and Answer session, Jaydeep agreed that this area was also small but was defined by modern technological capabilities rather than anything else.

I enjoyed his talk thoroughly. In the Question and Answer session, a little girl on the same row as me asked an intelligent question: "How do you know that the light from the Sun travels to Earth in (approximately) 8 minutes and not in 6 or 7 minutes?" This question set a rather high bar of expectations for questions but I believe was not met by the adult members in the audience including me. Jaydeep had bought goodies from NASA (brochures on Chandra and what I think is a sort of NASA flag) which were for people who asked questions but the writer of this blog got one for just being there.

[caption id="attachment_763" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Goodies provided. Image Credit: Pradeep Mohandas"][/caption]

The evening ended while we were expecting the news of the launch of SpaceX's Falcon launch vehicle. I boarded the bus when the Abort was called and the Falcon lifted off when I got off the bus!

Terrestar-1: To provide internet access to the not connected

2010-12-07T04:46:00.000+05:30

The company that owns the communication satellite, Terrestar-1 went bankrupt this October. An organisation called A Human Right, which seeks to connect everyone and advocate internet connection as a basic human right, is considering buying this satellite.

[caption id="attachment_758" align="aligncenter" width="400" caption="Terrestar-1 Satellite"][/caption]

For this, they have launched a new website called - Buy This Satellite. Here, they advocate a 3-phase plan for acquiring this satellite. They are currently in phase 1, trying to raise $150,000. They have managed to raise $26,200 so far. This money will go into developing a business plan, getting a technical team together and ironing out the legal and business wrinkles.

Interestingly, Suyash Tiwari, Director, Telecom Innovation Lab at Tata Consultancy Services is on board as an advisor for this project as well as for the organisation. This is an interesting Indian angle to the story.

Eventually, their hopes are to establish the satellite into a place where it can provide Internet access to countries like Papua New Guinea or those in Africa that have not been connected to the Internet.

Thanks to Keith Cowing for the hattip.

Indo-French Nuclear Co-operation

2010-12-06T17:47:00.000+05:30

Vaiju Naravane of The Hindu writes about the Indo-French nuclear co-operation specifically talking about the deal with French nuclear company, Areva. I have been learning of the Jaitapur Nuclear Plant project mostly through Greenpeace and their Nuclear-Unsafe campaign. Sadly, Areva's defences in public have not been very effective and have even been countered.

The Times of India today and the Greenpeace blog earlier reported on the protests against the Jaitapur Plant. It has been interesting to see a growing number of controversial projects coming up along the Maharashtra and Orissa coastlines.

I am personally not 100% against nuclear power. I am concerned about India putting in lots of public money to obtain a nuclear technology that is still in stages of refinement. In the software world, this is like downloading the beta or developers version of a software. One does not download such software if one does not know about the software's vulnerability and issues. Similarily, investing money without having experience or an authority in new nuclear plants, India should have played it more safely than it has. Hopefully, better sense prevails.

French President visits ISRO

2010-12-06T05:32:00.000+05:30

Not many heads of state come and visit the high-tech labs within India's space agency, ISRO. Perhaps the fact that the development of Megha-Tropiques and Saral were on, led the French President to visit the facility with First Lady Carla Bruni.

ISRO Chairman Radhakrishnan's opening remarks on how ISRO was helped in its propulsion systems technology by the French. He revealed that ISRO had signed a deal with ARIANESPACE to launch India's GSAT-8 in 2011 and GSAT-10 in 2012. He revealed that perhaps INSAT-3D would also be launched using ARIANESPACE's launch vehicle. INSAT-3D was to be launched on board a GSLV Mk-2. Perhaps it's failure to launch this year has pushed launches of critical satellites into ARIANESPACE. The only major deal to have been signed is with EADS Astrium, for which ISRO had built the Eutelsat-W2M and HYLAS-1.

The French President's remarks seem to have been directed at a more general audience than in ISRO itself talking about the United Nations, Afghanistan and Nuclear and education Co-operation. Further into his speech he said two lines without elaborating much but which are interesting: "We will launch Indian satellites from Kourou, and European satellites from India. CNES and ISRO will develop a new research programme together."

India already uses Kourou to launch various of its satellites but no pure European commercial satellite has been launched by India. For now, PSLV may be able to afford Europe a cheaper flight option than perhaps EADS. In an earlier report, EADS had suggested this as a possibility. The French President did not confirm this, though. The second line is interesting because of the shape this new research programme will take.

The other interesting statement from the French President's speech is the "an unprecedented technological experiment that India is conducting to understand its population" reference. I am not aware of this experiment at all and have been trying to understand this reference.

Back from a break...

2010-12-02T04:25:00.000+05:30

I finished writing my only exam that I had to write today. This exam has been the source of many pains and also led me to miss many things including Dr. Maqbool's talk which I had written about in these pages. This is just a heads-up saying I'm back and sharing a few random links to space articles that I missed in the past few days.

1. Dr. Syed Maqbool Ahmed's talk - press report + Srinivas' take on Dr. Ahmed's day in Mumbai and his talk.

2. An ongoing Astronomy festival in Bengaluru with participation from ISRO. The festival runs till December 5, 2010. I have sadly not seen many post event blog reports yet.

3. Abhilash M from the ISRO Inertials Systems Unit writes on The Voyage Blog on the World Space Week celebrations done by ISRO in Kerala.

4. Anantha Krishnan writes about India's success in developing indigenously electro-hydraulic servo valves (ESHVs) which have aerospace applications. It was developed by a team at Centre for Aerospace Products, Hyderabad.

5. Srinivas also shared an aspect of Chandrayaan-I hitherto not well known. He shared information on how the Parkes Observatory was used to help Chandrayaan-I get data down to Earth 24x7.

6. This last week, ISRO-built satellite Hylas-1 for Astrium and Avanti, launched from Kourou. The ISRO Press releases on the launch and its subsequent placement in geostationary orbit. Also, Srinivas' account is here.

With that, we now return to the normal scheduled programme. Coming over to the blog, you will find that it has been simplified even more.

Dr. Syed Maqbool Ahmed's Talk in Mumbai - An Invitation

2010-11-25T20:07:00.000+05:30

Readers of this blog may remember my references (if not, see here, here, here and here ) to Dr. Syed Maqbool Ahmed or his instrument, CHACE that flew on board the Moon Impact Probe on Chandrayaan-I. I am happy to report that Dr. Ahmed will be coming to Mumbai to give a talk on his instrument and it's journey to the Moon at the Observer Research Foundation offices in Nariman Point.

I have pasted the invitation image below. Please click on the image to enlarge and see details.

I would invite all readers of my blog to come and please attend the talk. Here's the information:

Talk: CHACE to the Moon

Date: November 29, 2010

Time: 5:30 pm (IST)

Venue: ORF Mumbai Office, NKM International House, 5th Floor, Babubhai Chinai Marg (Behind LIC ‘Yogakshema’), 178, Backbay Reclamation, Churchgate, Mumbai – 400020.

Contact: Dhaval Desai on 61313800 / 32513591 email: dhaval.d.desai@orfonline.org

Towards a future in amateur rocketry in India

2010-11-23T17:37:00.000+05:30

Amateur Rocketry is not treated as a sport in India like it is in the USA and increasingly so in Europe. There is a small band of enthusiasts in India, though. Since 2006, I have been trying to seek out possible venues by which the sport can be developed in the country. I was then part of Astronautical Society of India's Students Chapter (ASISC). Through this, we were able to conduct one workshop on amateur rocketry with Vikram Sarabhai Space Center, Thiruvananthapuram.

ASISC's then President, the late Anbarasan V and I spoke about this a lot over the phone. We decided to work within VSSC whilst we began looking for alternatives for building the sport across the country through an institutionalised approach. In 2007, during the SEDS International Conference (SEDSIC), we met members of the rocketry club in Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT). These people along with members from SEDS India enabled the launch of a student payload on July 7 this year. Later, at the International Astronautical Congress 2007 held in Hyderabad, I met two rocketeers, Sathya Kumar from Bengaluru and Hemil Modi from Pune. Sathya had bought photos of his efforts which made me lament the fact that I had not made a similar record of my activity. I did not then have even a camera phone!

These meetings told me that there was a small community of rocketeers in India quietly doing launches and doing interesting work. I was however stuck on doing this at a legal level as done in USA.

I also spoke to Pratham Ambla of Model Rocketry Club, India. He said that although the Government provided recognition for efforts there was no way to procure rocketry fuel, cast engines or have places to fly from. Currently, he was using festival-grade gun powder for powered flight of his rockets.

A few enquiries said that the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports provided licenses. This turned out to be a dead end, mostly. I am still trying to learn more and see if anything can be done. If you know anything on the topic, do let me know. Meanwhile, this is being done under the Earth to Moon Transportation Architecture Project (EMTA) in the Moon Society, India.

ISRO-built Hylas 1 to fly on November 26

2010-11-23T14:56:00.000+05:30

SatNews.com reports that Hylas-1 has finished integration and is ready for lift-off on November 26. The news is of importance to India, since this is the second satellite India's space agency, ISRO has built for Astrium. Earlier, it had built and launched Eutelsat W2M. However, a "power anomaly" had caused the satellite to fail in its assigned mission. There have not been any more clarifications on the satellite from ISRO.

Hylas-1 is the next satellite that ISRO has built at its ISRO Satellite Centre in Bengaluru. In August 2010, ISRO had posted a note on its website that the satellite had passed testing and was ready to be shipped to Guyana Space Centre. Here it was integrated on top of the Ariane 5 launch vehicle and will be launched between 6.39pm and 9.54pm (GMT) on November 26, 2010.

Blogging here will be sparse through December 1, 2010.

Expanding the scope of Parallel Spirals

2010-11-19T17:39:00.000+05:30

Well, the current website is the result of my third move. First, I moved from Parallel Spirals on Blogger to Bahirakasham, thence to pradeepmohandas.ind.in and thence here.

I have so far maintained this blog only to type out my most polished thoughts on the subject except space. This is, whether you like it or not a personal blog. I think there should be more of me and less of space made available on this blog. Although, I will keep people updated on space happenings as well, this blog will now serve up more than just space.

This is what companies like to call diversifying their offerings. These include and is not limited to these broad areas of interest: books, cycling, photography, simplicity and social networks.

I have also removed most of the stuff from the blog except for the content and the Apture plugin. On the sidebar, you will find only the license for the use of content and some administrative stuff. I am trying to reduce the blog to bare basics. Feedback is welcome!

Social Networks in India

2010-11-19T17:31:00.000+05:30

I have been watching and adopting various social media networks since
2005, when I joined hi5! I immediately moved to Orkut and this is
where I built my first social network. When Facebook opened to India
in 2006, I moved there as well and did invite my school friends there.

I have been watching social networks to try and leverage that to help
my space plans. Although I watched social networks, I just didn't get
to the part about leveraging social networks but did build a cool
space organisation. I just stuck to making my colleagues in the
organisation friends, first on Orkut and then on Facebook.

Till date, I feel more comfortable leaving a scrap on Orkut than
posting a 'hi...hello...how are you...fine...ok' thread on Facebook.
Events like fraandship requests and bad press pushed people out of
Orkut and onto Facebook.

My college friends stayed on Orkut initially and then moved to
Facebook when peers told them being on Facebook was considered cooler
and because many girls moved on to Facebook.

The fraandship requests originates from settings where people have
come on to a social network platform and didn't really know what to do
and just extended their Yahoo! Messenger experience onto the social
network. I think Orkut really helped polish many of the people there
who then carried the rules into Facebook.

I still remember scraps on Orkut about: not posting a scrap in your
own scrapbook, not trying to friend people you do not know and
expecting introductions when you add a person as a friend. These were
then also circulated among the offline channels - mainly through SMS.

As it has grown, social networks in India have also transformed
offline meetups because of a segregation in the kind of people who
hung around in each of these spaces.

The fraandship thing came as more of the rural and lower tier towns of
India came onto Orkut and began trying to make friends in the city
they planned on moving to. Urban and middle class Orkut users made fun
of this and proliferated this across initially to humiliate people who
didn't use proper spelling or grammer in their introductions of
friendship requests. Later this was used to reinforce the fact that
only known people are welcome as friends.

This also co-incided with the offline hang out culture. This shifted
as the more well to do kids hung out at the Cafe Coffee Days and
Baristas whereas the middle class and the lower income group kids hung
around inside of college canteens and wada pav stalls. Slowly,
Baristas and Cafe Coffee Days realised that more money could be made
inviting the middle class in as well and they moved to lower prices.

Funny enough, this coincided with the time that the bulk of Indians
moved onto Facebook and this network reinforced the coffee shop,
McDonalds and pizza culture more.

We're in an interesting time in social networks in India - at a time
when the crowd in Orkut has started moving to Facebook. Mainly because
brands have been using these to push prices down and also using the
network to hold and provide access to events. The Orkut experience has
made this crowd wiser and has moderated them. But, also a new
generation is coming directly onto Facebook than through Orkut. Some
of my friends have started seeing the 'fraandship-like' trend showing
up on Facebook as well. I haven't seen it either on Orkut or Facebook
other than on other people's scrap book.

Facebook also slowly pushed us off the 'introduce yourself' habit of
our Orkut days by not providing access to the wall without being a
friend in the privacy settings. More people are now also not using the
'add a message' option that appears when you ask a person to become
their friend.

The real thing to see now is how such a closed network like Facebook
will teach new comers on the unwritten network rules. I see this
happening in the offline world and some people say Facebook is very
complicated and Orkut has become complicated but is now resembling a
ghost town.

Today, I started scrapping on Orkut again. Watch this space as I post
more of my social network watching here.
1

Comments [0]

Interesting ways of recording our experience online

2010-11-19T17:30:00.000+05:30

I have been seeking ways of recording my experiences online since
2006. This was the year when I thought I had to record stuff and
things I did in my life. I had started recording on an offline diary
and notebook since 2000. I had also burned them in 2007 out of
frustration.

After burning it, I felt better temporarily but realised what huge
implication this had only on September 26, 2010 after I also disposed
off stuff in the after 2007 era. My blog is the only document left of
this era of mine other than stuff on social network sites and twitter.

It was here that I found the means provided by social network sites,
blogs, twitter and photo-sharing sites inadequate.

Also in 2007, I stumbled across www.stryder.com. This is one of the
strangest websites I have seen that the author classifies as 'weblog'.

My friend, Kirk Kittell as well began the organisation bogey putting
stuff in MediaWiki, Gallery, WordPress, Drupal and populated his stuff
on multiple sharing websites as a safety.

My legacy way of handling this would be longform writing. My slightly
advanced way was writing about it on my blog. In between, I used
Twitter, Tumblr and Notepad as various ways of recording stuff. None
really satisfied me.

I like blogging but more as a way to provide a complete picture and
not as a way of describing an evolving thinking process. I like to see
the blog as a post-event condensed report rather than a note taking
and structured thinking method.

These are my unpolished thoughts.

Transparency and Data Interpretation

2010-11-19T17:27:00.000+05:30

Yesterday night I wrote this on my twitter feed: Transparency without
an interpretation of what you're seeing is stupid.

I got to this point listening to a YouTube video on danah boyd
speaking at the Personal Democracy forum last year. Her speech was all
about how transparency must be combined with data literacy and
information interpretation skills for it to be effective.

The point is even more true in India and when you add on the
complexity of language and level of education, this becomes even more
important and difficult. It also becomes more important since the US
Government says India is the example in open government to follow. We
have to identify and let people who adopt our open government
initiative understand the limitations and adapt.

One solution to this is information graphics made popular in recent
times by websites such as informationisbeautiful.com. These are easier
to convey to an adult population with partial literacy. Imagine how
people handed a huge file would feel when they were afraid of even a
school text. Infographics on a single page with an email id and a
phone number which tells you details of the infographic is more simple
to handle.

However, not all information can be put up in terms of infographics
and it is for the IT and design guys to take up the challenge of how
to convey information already made transparent to people who need it
the most and who may be illiterate or cannot pay to access such
information. The people who do access this information also need to
learn about how to use it and how to interpret it.

Although the Government of India has started putting out information
it hasn't pushed for its usage like the US or UK. But Indians, being
Indians have started utilising this data. I have started finding blogs
that have started linking to this data and who have used this data to
make infographics. A few media outlets also use this tool very
effectively to emphasise their story. This data provides possibility
for a coder, provides the need for data literacy for the transparency
activist and calls for creative display of this data from designers.

Moving towards Nature

2010-11-19T17:25:00.000+05:30

In 2001, I started seeing people jogging and begin going to the gym.

As time passed, more and more people started doing such recreational activities and today many Indians are very conscious of how they look.

I think we're in a somewhat similar condition to that today regarding with environment. There is the slow creation of awareness and there are products and offerings that are slowly emerging and the green market is opening up.

The next generation has started becoming somewhat environment conscious when buying things. This is not as widespread as we like it to be but it is an emerging trend worth noticing.

Specifics on ISRO removal of entity list

2010-11-12T01:42:00.000+05:30

Not many people have got into specifics of how ISRO has been removed off the entity list. My friend Srinivas Laxman wrote an article on the same and it appeared only on a few editions of the Times of India and that too has been hard to find, 4 days after it was published.

The following ISRO centres have been removed from the list:

Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (Thiruvanathanapuram),

Satish Dhawan Space Centre (Sriharikota),

Solid Propellant Rocket Booster Plant (Sriharikota),

Liquid Propulsion Systems Centre (Mahendra Giri, Tamil Nadu).

The US had earlier removed the following ISRO centres off the entities list:

Isro headquarters at Bangalore,

Isro Telemetry Tracking and Command Network

Inertial Systems Unit

Specific components that can now be imported by ISRO include:

wave tube amplifiers used in communication satellites,

microprocessors,

radiation hardened components used in satellites,

optics-related items

memory devices used both in satellites and rockets.

It would be interesting to know if this has been opened up for the civilian population as well. Probably not.

ISRO headed for the ISS?

2010-11-12T01:36:00.000+05:30

In the Plenary Session of International Astronautical Congress 2010, ISRO Chairman Dr K Radhakrishnan said that India did not have any plans of joining the International Space Station. This happened in September 2010. In November 2010, a joint diplomatic statement said this:

They agreed to continuing discussions on and seek ways to collaborate on future lunar missions, international space station, human space flight and data sharing, and to reconvene the Civil Space Joint Working Group in early 2011.

There has been continuing talks with the US? If so, I think that Radhakrishnan would have done well to indicate that there was an invitation from the international community but India had not decided yet. His statement did not make this clear.

I do not know what they are talking about when they mention "future lunar missions". This could mean India's manned lunar efforts targetted for 2021, as per Madhavan Nair.

The help in human spaceflight may relate to offers by the Boieng company among many others whilst India and NASA are already sharing data on OCEANSAT-2 and hope to share data acquired from RESOURCESAT-1 as well.

Srinivas Laxman has made it more clearer in this blog post, so that I can limit myself with what's not there. A briefer version is his report for the Times of India.

My personal view point on this is that it would be better if India joined ISS earlier rather than later. Making a decision by as early as 2012, will ensure that it has upto 2016 to carry on operations on-board. I say 2016 because NASA is committed to support ISS operations till this date, although it is expected to extend the same upto 2020.

Chang'e-II releases pictures of the Moon

2010-11-09T05:32:00.000+05:30

On October 27, 2010, China moved its second lunar orbiter into an orbit that allowed it to swoop to an altitude of 15 km above the lunar surface to take high resolution images of the lunar surface where its next mission, Chang'e-III is expected to land. This is the Bay of Rainbows. The following are images released [the pages are in Chinese, you will have better luck using Google Translate than by clicking the English button] by the China National Space Administration today.

[caption id="attachment_707" align="aligncenter" width="565" caption="Chang'e-II Local Image Map"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_700" align="aligncenter" width="480" caption="Bay of Rainbow - 3D Landscape. Image Credit: CNSA"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_701" align="aligncenter" width="480" caption="Dan Nie Er Crater. Image Credit: CNSA"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_702" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="Laplace-A 3D Landscape plan. Image Credit: CNSA"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_703" align="aligncenter" width="480" caption="Antarctic Crater. Image Credit: CNSA"][/caption]

The images were released today by Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao whilst India was busy hosting President Obama. Thanks to Tavi Greiner for alerting me to the pics and for providing links to the images.

Barack Obama visits Mumbai and Delhi

2010-11-09T01:55:00.000+05:30

Update: Global Voices Online has a great round-up of the other blog posts from India on the topic.

For the past three days, Mumbai and Delhi has welcome President Barack Obama of the United States of America and his entourage. A couple of hours before I write this, he spoke to a Joint Session of both Houses of the Indian Parliament.

I found his speech to be a great "Grow up!" speech whilst also showing understanding in several issues that Indians think as vital - terrorism, UN Security Council permanent seat, issues with Pakistan and China and trade. He also used the opportunity wisely to push India towards engaging with Pakistan, play a more pivotal role in Afghanistan and urge Burma to move towards democracy. He also urged India to take up more responsibility and speak up in several international fora.

Personally, I loved that he has now pushed ISRO and DRDO out of the "entity list" and also alluded to India's technological and democratic success. I also liked the fact that he alluded to placing India's flag on the Moon!

There seems to have been a huge amount of preparations in Mumbai for the visit of the US President. Significant weightage was given to the point that the President would visit Mumbai before he did visit Delhi. A point, pointed to me by my friend Srinivas Laxman, which I agree with is the fact that most documents of significance and worth on this trip were done in Mumbai. I think it is time for Mumbai to re-take its role as a cultural and technological leadership of the country which it had been in the 1960s and in the past.

The President spoke at the 26/11 Memorial, where people expected him to mention Pakistan particularly. But, I thought the moment was not appropriate to mention it. It was a speech of remembrance rather than a place to blame and seek action against the perpetrators.

The President then spoke at the St. Xavier's College in Mumbai. This was called a Town Hall meeting. This initially confused many people who thought that the President was going to be speaking at the Asiatic Society (Town Hall Mumbaikars call it). Here a collegian Afsheen Irani asked Obama the Pakistan question which forced him to mention about it for the first time on his visit. The question became quite popular and was covered by the press all across the globe. It even came up in the first question asked by a Washington Post journalist during the Joint Press Conference.

The President spoke at the US-India Business Council Meeting where he first mentioned about high-technology exchanges and signed agreements that have apparently created 50000 - 54000 jobs in the USA and also laid to rest some niggling India had with his mentions regarding Outsourcing. The Prime Minister quite spiritedly added when asked the same question at the Joint Press Conference that India was not in the business of stealing jobs.

I am happy that I didn't go for his talks at Xavier's since I don't think I would have been able to have a way to write this so pleasantly. Otherwise, it would have all been about the unending security and long lines and the hot sun.

All in all, for three days now, the Indian media has been on the Obama hype covering every word that he uttered and analysing them. There have also been some healthy jokes and an almost constant commentary on Twitter. Now, that he's headed to Indonesia, I hope we return to our normal programming schedule.