Parallel Spirals

Standing on the shores of space-time…

Blog

  • Astrology is not a Science petition

    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 6, 2011 as per the time stamp. I’m trying to collect here again all my old writings spread on various blogs.

    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 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.

    ,

  • A fusion power generator in every home?

    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 4, 2011 as per the time stamp. I’m trying to collect here again all my old writings spread on various blogs.

    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 by 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.

    , , , ,

  • PSLV to fly this February

    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 4, 2011 as per the time stamp. I’m trying to collect here again all my old writings spread on various blogs.

    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!

    , , ,

  • February Observatory Improvement: Gauribidanur

    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 1, 2011 as per the time stamp. I’m trying to collect here again all my old writings spread on various blogs.

    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!

    ,

  • ISRO-Devas Deal update – my take

    Looking at various news items today it seems that former ISRO Chairman, Madhavan Nair continues to attack individuals for blaming him in relation to the ISRO-Devas deal. Here he hits out against V Narayanaswamy, a Union Minister. This is after he hit out at his colleague and current ISRO Chairman, K Radhakrishnan.

    On January 11, Deccan Chronicle carried an article stating that the former ISRO Chairman had written a letter to protest of the fact that a Committee looking into the Devas deal had not followed “due process” in submitting that report. Later, The Indian Express on January 25 reported that former ISRO Chairman Madhavan Nair, former Scientific Secretary, A Bhaskarnarayana; former Managing Director, Antrix Corporation, K R Sridharmurthi and former ISRO Satellite Center chief, K N Shankara have been barred from holding office in the ISRO-Devas deal. Jaimon Joseph has written out some of the intricacies of that case in this blog post. That post also has this article by R Ramachandran which is worth linking to and reading about.

    These are the salient points of the event so far. I don’t think that Madhavan Nair and the others named in that order should have been dealt in the way they were. They should not have heard of such an order from the press. The order came out in January 13. The Indian Express report came out on January 25. The Government seems to have sufficient time to convey this order to the people whom it was brought out against. I think the whole affair could have been handled in a different way, given the stature of the people the order sought to take action against.

    Madhavan Nair losing his composure given a newspaper report is surprising. The way he hit out at these people seems unnatural and seems to point to some frustration that he nurtures. However, being a scientist of his stature, he is also responsible for his actions in the public sphere – especially on television. In this context, I can understand the scientists reaction attacking Madhavan Nair for reacting the way he did.

    Reacting in this way, without having an official copy of the order and basing it on a newspaper report was a mistake that Madhavan Nair made. The others named in the order maintained this stance better even under pressure from the media for quotes. Today, Sridharmurthy ventured a little more but was more speculation.

    The ISRO Chairman, Dr Radhakrishnan’s silence at this point is to be criticised. Even if not to retort against Madhavan Nair’s outburst, I think it was his responsibility to clear the air on bringing out the Devas Report and providing the basis for the action taken against such reputed scientists. This is a situation somewhat akin to Dr Manmohan Singh’s silence at various junctures in the Government cases. I think Dr. Radhakrishnan could also come out on what procedures would be followed by the organisation for something as valuable as the S-band frequencies that India seems to have lost out on.

    To conclude, I think the Department of Space and Dr. Radhakrishnan must table the report. I also think Madhavan Nair must pen his thoughts rather than blurt them out on the television. I think the television media has taken some of his comments out of context and might hurt him in the long run. I think the other scientists have conducted themselves extremely well. I hope they too can pen their thoughts on this somewhere. I hope at least now the order is sent out to these scientists so that they can read them and not continue to hear about them from “media sources” or see copies of this order. I also think we need to spare a thought for the employees at ISRO who are passing through a critical phase and I really hope morale does not fail. ISRO is a great institution and I hope that like in a mission failure, it does a critical review of itself and emerges better from this whole controversial environment, it finds itself in.

    ,

  • 13 Zodiac and Explanation

    Explanation from Raghunandan from the Planetary Society, India:

    The order of the constellations of the Zodiac (as given by the apparent motion of the Sun over a year) starting with the Vernal Equinox and proceeding eastward along the Ecliptic is

    PiscesThe FishesMarch12  to  April18
    AriesThe RamApril19  to  May13
    TaurusThe BullMay14  to  June19
    GeminiThe TwinsJune20  to  July20
    CancerThe CrabJuly21  to  August9
    LeoThe LionAugust10  to  September15
    VirgoThe MaidenSeptember16  to  October30
    LibraThe BalanceOctober31  to  November22
    ScorpiusThe ScorpionNovember23  to  November29
    Ophiuchus**The Serpent-holderNovember30  to  December17
    SagittariusThe ArcherDecember18  to  January18
    CapricornusThe GoatJanuary19  to  February15
    AquariusThe Water-bearerFebruary16  to  March11

    The Constellations of the Zodiac :

    The ancients observed that the Sun, Moon and those 5 funny wandering stars (the planets known to the ancients) seem to be constrained to a particular region of the sky, never traveling really far north or south of a wide band of stars. They divided this sky band into 12 sections based on the old constellations, each differing in width but all of them about 16° high (+8°/-8°) and called them the “Zodiac”. Each division is named for the constellation situated within its limits in the 2nd century B.C.!

    The name “Zodiac” is derived from the Greek, meaning “animal circle” (also related to the word “zoo”), and it comes from the fact that most of these constellations are named for animals, such as Leo, the Lion, Taurus, the Bull and Cancer, the Crab. It turns out that this band of the sky is centered on a line called the “ecliptic” which is the apparent path the Sun appears to take through the sky as a result of the Earth’s revolution around it (actually, it is defined as the projection the Earth’s orbital plane into outer space). If we could see the stars in the daytime, we would see the Sun slowly wander from one constellation of the Zodiac to the next, making one complete circle around the sky in one year. Which constellation the Sun was in had to be inferred by drawing all the constellations, then noting which was the last to set before sunrise and which was the first to rise after sunset then assuming the Sun was half way in between.

    Distance of Orion
    88 Constellations

    Source:

  • An Alternative Stack for India’s Space Programme

    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 31, 2010 as per the time stamp. I’m trying to collect here again all my old writings spread on various blogs.

    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.

  • CIRUS decomissioning

    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 31, 2010 as per the time stamp. I’m trying to collect here again all my old writings spread on various blogs.

    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.

  • Establish Transparent Failure Analysis Systems

    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 31, 2010 as per the time stamp. I’m trying to collect here again all my old writings spread on various blogs.

    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.

  • Madhavan Nair on the GSLV Failure

    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 31, 2010 as per the time stamp. I’m trying to collect here again all my old writings spread on various blogs.

    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.

    ,