Author: Pradeep

Note: I wrote this on my earlier blog hosted as http://parallelspirals.blogspot.com. I recovered the text from the WayBack Machine. This post appeared on December 09, 2010 as per the time stamp. I’m trying to collect here again all my old writings spread on various blogs.

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.

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.

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!

Note: I wrote this on my earlier blog hosted as http://parallelspirals.blogspot.com. I recovered the text from the WayBack Machine. This post appeared on December 07, 2010 as per the time stamp. I’m trying to collect here again all my old writings spread on various blogs.

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.

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.

Note: I wrote this on my earlier blog hosted as http://parallelspirals.blogspot.com. I recovered the text from the WayBack Machine. This post appeared on December 06, 2010 as per the time stamp. I’m trying to collect here again all my old writings spread on various blogs.

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.