Category: Space

  • Telescopes of India Tour – consolidated account

    I have created a consolidated Google account for all matters related to Telescopes of India tour. Please send future emails to this account – telescopesofindiatour at gmail.com. I have also setup a seperate blog where the information that I collect during the tour will be stored. I will share the web address with you next week. Stay tuned.

  • Telescope of India Tour – Responses

    First of all, I’d like to clarify that this tour is now being backed by SEDS India. It’s an organisation that I have been leading for the past 4 years now and we’re under the process of registeration.

    Now that, that’s out of the way, I have been getting quite a response to my yesterday’s blog post and emails to several mailing lists that I have been on –

    • Manoj Pai from Confederation of Indian Amateur Astronomers (CIAA) wrote in with some words of advice. I really appreciate that.
    • I got a reply from Halit and Bijal from Space Generation Advisory Council asking for any help in communicating with IYA teams.
    • Svetlana Shkolyar from the 4Frontiers Corporation wrote to me. They’ve developed packaged tours for visiting space centres in the US. On the page, they’ve also mentioned about doing something similar in India, with ISRO. They’ve offered to do something similar in the US. It’s an exciting prospect and I will definitely give it a thought.
    • Vikrant Narang from SPACE wrote in to me and has offered to give me a helping hand in organising trips in North India. Thanks, I’ll get in touch with you if I need any help!
    • I’ve also got emails from Kalam Nagappan, whom I met during IAC and Rajdilwar about joining me on this trip.
    • Rashmi Bansal editior of the student mag JAM also wrote in. Turns out her dad works for ISRO! Cool!
    • Update: I’ve also got an offer from Planetary Society, India for free accomodation and visit to observatoryin Andhra Pradesh and facilitation of accomodation if more number of people with the help of Government of Andhra Pradesh.

    Thanks for your emails guys.I will reply to you individually as soon as I can. Also, if you’re planning to do something similar in your country, please do write in to me using the contact form.

  • Telescopes of India tour

    Next year is the International Year of Astronomy. I hope to make a small contribution towards this by going on a “Telescopes of India” tour. I plan to go around the country and visit the various radio and optical observatories in the country.

    What will I do there? First, learn about what they are doing there and why. Second, talk to the people behind the observatory to learn more about their work. Lastly, I want to enjoy as much as I can.

    Right now, the trip is in the planning stages. The only thing that is certain right now is that I am going. As a first stage I plan to make a spreadsheet of all the Indian observatories and a map of these locations.

    Want to help? If you are part of any observatory in the country, please do write to me with the details using my contact form. If you would like to send any words of caution, suggestions or advice, please do leave them in my comments. I also encourage you to do something similar in your country.

  • NEO Study Center Needed

    After the discovery of the Shiva Crater (on Wikipedia), I also found what seems to be a crater in Rajasthan called the Ramgarh Crater. All of these sites are really in a rough 500 km diameter around Mumbai. That’s like drawing a target with the centre of the bull’s eye on Mumbai. And Space seems to be playing that game and is coming really close to the city. Earlier, since humans did not exist at all, it was not really a matter of concern. But now, it might be.

    It is with this idea that I propose to start a NEO (Near Earth Object) Study Centre in Mumbai. This is an amateur effort which means – it’s voluntary but atleast I think it is worth the effort. Studies here will have an impact off closing links with study in the United States and Europe and probably coming up with a better complete picture.

    Think about the impact of a meteorite/comet today. How prepared are we for it? What kind of disaster management efforts can be made in case of an impact? What would be the effect of an impact in the Arabian Sea on Mumbai and nearby regions? These are some of the things that we plan to study at this centre.

    To start things off I’m planning to make a detailed study of these three craters – Lonar, Shiva and Ramgarh. The preliminary ground for these studies will be this blog. We can then probably shift it to a blog of its own once we have enough resources planned for the NEO Study Centre.

    If you’re interested in joining in, leave your comment and I shall get back to you. You can be based in Maharashtra, Goa, Gujarat or Rajasthan to be a part of this Study Centre.

  • The Shiva Crater

    I just discovered that I live quite close to a crater which can be termed as a KT extinction crater. Translated in lay speak as a mass extinction crater. It’s not everyday that you discover you live close to a crater that possibly was cause of the extinction of life (of any sort) all across the globe. Or maybe I didn’t understand the implications possibly.

    Discovered in Wikipedia. The Shiva Crater.

  • Registering for Wikimania – Waiting for the email

    (Written on 16/3/08 – still stands correct)

    It may probably be Engineering Student’s Fever (ESF – last minute rush to complete assignments, projects etc after lounging around till then) but I waited till the 15th to get myself registered for Wikimania 2008 at Alexandira, Egypt. No amount of waiting got me that confirmation email which would have enabled me to register SEDSWiki for Wikimania. Maybe we could do it next year with a more developed wiki? Who knows?

    For practise runs of the more important conferences, try talking at the local BarCamps, that keep happening in many of the cities around the world. The sidebar on the BarCamp page has a list of the latest happening BarCamps all across the world. If you don’t know what a BarCamp is, you should probably wake up and read this.

  • Space and the Wisdom of the Crowds

    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 February 28, 2008 as per the timestamp. I’m trying to collect here again all my old writings spread on various blogs.

    I picked up James Surowiecki‘s book The Wisdom of Crowds from my library today. It’s byline reads: Why the many are smarter than the few? It’s basically a management book and the only reason I picked it up was to get a management eye view of why this happens. I’ve seen this work in some cases within SEDS and in some cases even in my class, so I really am biased towards the view that crowds can sometimes make better decisions than the experts of the field given a particular situation.

    The book makes a reference to an event that occurred immediately after the Challenger disaster on January 28, 1986. The launch was televised, so the news of the incident did spread quite quickly. One of the people who got this news was the Dow Jones, a stock market. Dow Jones did not stop trading for mourning but continued trading.

    Four companies were involved in the Challenger programme: Rockwell International (built the shuttle and the main engine), Lockheed (ground support), Martin Marietta (external fuel tanks) and Morton Thiokol (solid fuel booster rocket). These shares started declining in the market 21 minutes after the disaster. Stocks of the companies involved fell almost immediately. By the end of the day, the stocks of Morton Thiokol fell by 12% while the other companies recovered and had fallen only by about 3%.

    Six months after the explosion, the Presidential Commission on the Challenger held Morton Thiokol liable for the disaster due to the failure of the O-Ring which became less resilient in cold weather and allowed the gases to leak out.

    Surowiecki argues that the collective wisdom of the market crowd had squarely blamed Morton Thiokol for the disaster within a day which was later proved as the correct by the Presidential Commission. Surowiecki points out that a study by finance professors Michael Maloney and J. Harold Mulherin into the stock market reaction discovered no foul play or backstage manipulation leading to the steeper fall of the Thiokol stocks. Surowiecki states that what happened was that a large crowd was asked the question – How much less worth are these four companies worth now that the Challenger has exploded? and the market responded with an objectively correct answer. Thus, Surowiecki says that the average answer of the crowd will be at least as good as or even better than the answer of the smartest member.

    Stock Markets and space? Whoodathunkit? I wonder if similar studies have been made after the Columbia disaster and the Apollo-11 landings.

     

  • IIT-B developing microsatellite

    Note: I wrote this on my earlier blog hosted as https://blogs.seds.org/pradeep. I recovered the text from the WayBack Machine. This post appeared on December 19, 2007 as per the timestamp. I’m trying to collect here again all my old writings spread on various blogs.

    I got a great shock today morning reading the newspapers. Got the news that IIT-B is developing a 10-kg micro-satellite.

    This is a growing trend of developing small satellites that I am so happy to see in India. I have been wanting to see something like this happen ever since I saw the CalPoly Cubesat page that was filled with student satellite projects from other countries.

    While the newspaper article quotes only the other satellite developed by Anna University, there are satellites under development at IIA, IISc and VIT besides the one at IIT-B and Anna University. I also hear reports of a college in Hyderabad starting their own small satellite project as well. SEDS-India also has a small satellite project that you will hear from soon.

    It’s a small satellite project in the making and I can name atleast a dozen colleges which can take up the project if there are interested students there. IIT-Kanpur is one of them.  Hopefully, this student satellite space race will lead to something more substantial in the future.

    With so many student satellites in the offing, the Indian rocketry community has a great opportunity in their hands. Anyone listening?

  • Space and Ham Radio

    Note: I wrote this on my earlier blog hosted as https://blogs.seds.org/pradeep. I recovered the text from the WayBack Machine. This post appeared on December 15, 2007 as per the timestamp. I’m trying to collect here again all my old writings spread on various blogs.

    I fell in love with ham radios in 2004 when I was an electronics student (as an elective) in my junior college. In the same year, I read Maryam’s blog and saw that ham radios can be used in space arena too. It was only the exams that I had to give to obtain a ham license that made me think twice. At that point, I had written a string of engineering admission tests that was driving me nuts and I couldn’t handle another test.

    At the SEDS International Conference 2007, some of the earlier interest was re-kindled and also an amazing ‘discovery’. ISRO had a ham radio club.

    2 + 2 = 4 !!!

    It would be really great if we could establish a ham radio club in every SEDS chapter in India. Besides performing scientific experiments and performing basic satellite communication operations if needed, it also opened another door – a way of talking to ISRO and literally!

    ISRO has a ham radio club at most of its centres – Thumba Amateur Radio Club (VU2TRC) at VSSC, ISTRAC Amateur Radio Club (VU2FBS) at Bangalore, at the Master Control Facility (VU2MCF) at Hassan and the more famous Upagraha Amateur Radio Club (VU2URC) at Bangalore. This provides a great opportunity to talk to ISRO scientists who are not always phone and email friendly.

    Besides that, we could also talk to SEDS chapters all over the world for free (Internet and telephone still include costs) besides networking in India. Who wants to take the challenge first? This is also an opportunity for all hams who have a space interest!

    For more info, visit www.amsatindia.org.

  • Your meteorites belong to Calcutta Museum

    Note: I wrote this on my earlier blog hosted as https://blogs.seds.org/pradeep. I recovered the text from the WayBack Machine. This post appeared on December 15, 2007 as per the timestamp. I’m trying to collect here again all my old writings spread on various blogs.

    I read an article today in the Times of India which runs a column called Tribal Instincts, which talks about unusual groups.This week they covered an astronomy club called Aakash Ganga Centre for Astronomy.

    Bharat Adur from the Centre revealed what for me was a strange piece of information: any object falling from the sky on Indian territory, as per law belongs to the Calcutta Museum. I don’t know if this is a law that is implemented or followed but it seems strange.

    Shouldn’t the collection which can be useful for astronomical, biological and geological research be at a centre that looks at it from all of these view points? Maybe, we need something along the lines of the International Meteor Organisation. Just worth thinking about.