Parallel Spirals

Standing on the shores of space-time…

Blog

  • International Year of Astronomy begins

    Well, I never do much blogging on the first day of the year, devoting more to life and all such. But, since 2009 is also being marked as the International Year of Astronomy 2009 by a visit to Nehru Planetarium, that bastion of astronomy for the general public. I came back from this trip a bit disappointed, more on that in an accompanying post.I have also put together ISRO’s technological highlights for 2008. I will also begin updating my Telescopes of India blog on a weekly basis starting today.

    Wishing everyone who passes by a Happy New Year 2009.

  • What’s the program, 2009

    2008 has been overall not been too good. I’ve become lazy, stupid, careless, angry, unhealthy, addicted to GPRS and more committed to getting a job in ISRO! But, its helped in meeting more wonderful people, providing great insights into myself (during the lazy bouts), better awareness, a maturity and possibly a philosophy that I can call my own. It’s been wonderful to see all of these things melting together to package my life. But, I guess we always strive for better things in life and I think I could do with a little discipline.

    On the agenda for 2009 are a slight weight loss and health gain, less lazy life, addition of interesting information, recapturing old interests and living life to the fullest again. Before today, I’ve never demanded but have always got my things through manipulation and creating under currents. I’ve been a bore because there was nothing working except my brain and you’ve gotta excuse the old bean for not coming up with things that I was doing when I was lazy. :)

    So, let’s get to work on 2009, which is coming up in 4 days (assuming today is over and it’s 27th).

    Let’s begin from health gain. I’ve never exercised in my life and therefore I’ve managed to grow in several directions and have had a great time being lazy. But, I guess from 2009 for about 30 more years, I’ll be working my ass off to satisfy myself and enjoy life to fullest before retiring and going lazy again! On the works are a spiritual and physical self-training program like no other. The program could have the side benefit of teaching me how to fix my own cycle, which is good in case I go out of a job with the continuing recession and all! It could also make me a master Yoga expert teaching 40 kids how to do Yoga to relieve stress from the work they do. Although, I don’t want to do either, but it’s cool no? This also involves an extension on the ban on fast food to everything. Personally, fast food aids me to lose all my pains. I almost use it like drugs. There’s nothing 2 samosas and a bottle of Coke won’t do for me. But, I’ll try and be off them even if it pains me.

    Academics are a painful reality and I’m more than happy to be out of college in 2009. If there’s anything trying to stop me, I’m pretty sure it will not succeed. There’s nothing that will stop me from not graduating this year unless of course I die or if I battle deadly diseases never seen before by mankind or if a beautiful girl elopes with me (hopefully, that girl has enough money for both of us to survive cause I don’t) or perhaps all those other little things which rarely happen.

    I almost hate everything that I have to study, so I’ll be taking up some notes that my friend Kirk has uploaded online along with a few books on mathematics, radio astronomy and computers. These will be a self-learning program along with learning many points in law. I think my friend, Raghunandan can help me with some law points. And last but not the least, I plan to do multiplication tables again!

    From all the drab world we go to the world of the Internet. 2009 will see more of my life streams going online. My new cell phone enables me to upload videos and photos. If I can I also plan to participate in the 365 Days of Astronomy Programme. Let’s see how that goes. Keep watching this space here. Talking about this space, I have gone back to my old domain – http://www.pradx.org. Don’t have to move there now, I’ll only be moving in September 2009 when the furniture there will be ready for all of you and you’ll can come visit.

    I plan to work in 3 projects overall. 1 is my final year undergrad project at Air India. The second is the Telescopes of India tour project. The last one is a bit of a secret for now, but I will reveal it at the appropriate time.

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  • Past Week in Space #1

    A hopefully weekly column in this blog that seeks to track the weekly space news. It doesn’t have the usual NASA/ESA traffic unless it is important. I think there are enough blogs/forums out there covering such things without having to add something of my own. The timeline is in reverse chronology.

    1. The NASA’s M3 team which has been discussing the science behind the mission on its blog announced the final result of its efforts by announcing that the M3 had found iron-bearing minerals on the lunar surface. Data from this 7 kg mapper on board Chandrayaan 1 provides an opportunity for scientists to look at the Moon with high spatial and spectral resolution.
    2. The ISRO chairman said that anyone who is “young, healthy, physically active and has a terrific spirit of adventure” can come and be a part of India’s cosmonaut corps. This is an oppertunity that I guess, many of you have been waiting for!
    3. Europe got its first dark sky park in southern Scotland this week. As the report clarifies further this is a recognised park by the International Dark-Skies Association. There are also only two other dark sky parks – one in Utah and another in Pennsylvania.
    4. Every Christmas the guys at the top-secret NORAD use their useful and super-secret equipment to track Santa. In this venture they have tied up with Know-it-All Google giants. Here is Santa going past the Taj Mahal(YouTube video) captured using its top secret web cams and advanced surviellance cameras. These cameras are used only once in a year to track Santa.
    5. ISRO also updated its website with more images from Chandrayaan 1’s . The images posted on the Chandrayaan 1 website has very poor captioning. I do hope that with the announcement of more missions like the manned space flight and mission to Mars, ISRO’s information skills improve. The images were updated on December 24.
    6. Chairman, ISRO announced a slew of missions at the CII conference in Delhi. Confirmed are the fact that Chandrayaan II’s design is ready and that the agency was on the road to putting a rover on the Moon by 2012. It also announced the year of India’s Mars Mission – 2013. Following these more robotic missions involved landing a space craft on an asteroid and a comet flyby mission. On the Indian human space flight front, Indians are going to fly on board a Russian space craft in 2013 and will fly in an indigenous space craft in 2015.
    7. A state of the art communication satellite jointly built by Antrix/ISRO and EADS Astrium for one of Europe’s largest telecom operators Eutelsat was successfully launched from Kourou, French Guyana. The satellite weighing a huge 3463 kgs lifted off on an Ariane-5 rocket at 0405 hrs (IST) on December 21. ISRO completed the satellite in a cool 26 months at a cost of $80 million. The Economic Times reported that Antrix/ISRO made a handsome $40 million profit from the same. The Ariane 5 placed the satellite in Geosynchronus Transfer Orbit or GTO after which ISRO controlled the satellite from its Master Control Facility or MCF-Hassan, stabilized the satellite with repeated Liquid Apogee Motor (LAM) firing to place it in final orbit and deployed its appendages.
    8. In another rocketry related event at ISRO this week, ISRO tested the new indigenously developed cryogenic engine. The test was conducted at the Mahendragiri facility of the Liquid Propulsion Systems Centre (LPSC). The engine will be used on the third stage of Geosynchronus Satellite Launch Vehicle or GSLV. The engine develops a thrust of 73kN in vaccum with a specific impulse of 454 seconds. The engine works on staged combustion cycle and runs an integrated turbopump at a speed of 42000rpm. This will allow GSLV to place a 2200 kg payload in Geosyncrhonus Transfer Orbit.
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  • Banning online satellite imagery services to combat terrorism

    This article originally appeared on my blog http://pradx.wordpress.com. I recovered the post using Wayback Machine.

    A PIL has been filed against providing free online satellite imagery in India. I really do not understand how this is going to help without beefing up security on the ground. A few points for your consideration:

    1. How many such services will you ban? Google Earth is perhaps the most famous. Besides, these are embedded in several websites which can be used to get the information wanted. Besides that such services are provided by Wikimapia, Yahoo! and Microsoft. Have a great time blocking all these sites.

    2. If you ban it in India, can’t they access it from any other country? As far as media reports go, terrorists weren’t trained in India, so I’m pretty sure they won’t access the internet from here. They can easily access the site from another country, take a print out and do what they came here to do, while people who use such services are major losers.

    3. Google Earth has been used not only by researchers and scientists but also in class rooms and communities to fight several issues against the Government.

    4. All publicly released satellite imagery generally tend to be 1-4 years old. Is that really useful? The maps for my place look totally different today than as seen on Google Maps/Earth.

    5. If such services are so useful to terrorists, why hasn’t the Police taken steps to use them for their benefit. (I know this is not really a valid point for or against the ban, but merely a thought that came to me as I typed this)

    Technology is always a double edged sword that can cut either way. These are most of the objections I can immediately think of for not banning services such as Google Earth. If you can think of others, please do leave them in the comments. Thanks

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  • India goes to the Moon!

    This article originally appeared on my blog http://pradx.wordpress.com. I recovered the post using Wayback Machine.

    :)

    Yeah! It is yesterday’s news and you might be wondering what I have been doing for so long when the greatest news in the Indian space programme was breaking. Well, I was busy being Chandrayaan1 on Twitter. 

    This is not connected in any way to ISRO – although I do email them the questions that I get here. I haven’t told that many people what I have been doing either. I have tried my best – please do have a look and comment!

    Well, to summarize all the news – India’s first space craft to the Moon has successfully reached lunar orbit and is now circling the moon in a 100 kms circular polar orbit, doing the orbit in an awesome 2 hours.  Two on board instruments – RADOM and TMC have been switched on and are working. TMC is a camera that is taking images of the moon while the RADOM is a radiation sampler.

    Tonight at around 10 pm, Chandrayaan 1 will drop the MIP (Moon Impact Probe) onto the surface of the moon. It has flags painted on four sides and will be the FIRST INDIAN OBJECT ON THE MOON! This drop will show that India can drop a probe/lander/rover onto the lunar surface the next time we come to the Moon!

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  • Chandrayaan 1 on Twitter

    This article originally appeared on my blog http://pradx.wordpress.com. I recovered the post using Wayback Machine.

    I tried tweeting as Chandrayaan1 on Twitter. Please do look at the feed and share your thoughts. I should have organised this a bit much more and announced it before the launch. But its never too late. This is the unofficial feed.

    Also, if you were in a big group when you watched the launch, please do send me the name of your group and where you watched the launch from, and I shall be happy to add it to the Chandrayaan 1 feed.

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  • How can youth be more proactive in helping shape our space programme?

    This article originally appeared on my blog http://pradx.wordpress.com. I recovered the post using Wayback Machine.

    Bijal Thakore, recently on the Planetary Society board, asked people: How can youth be more proactive in helping shape our space programs? This is not really an exact reply to that question but is a first general hit in that direction. Let’s see where the thought process goes.

    1. Outreach is a good place to start and learn things that you don’t know about. It’s also a good way to show people in space missions/projects etc. how passionate you are on a subject or in a field. I believe that is the extent to which outreach can be pushed. It gives you a sense of recognition for your passion.
    2. The second thing to get involved – specially students is to understand their own country’s space policy. Organisations like SEDS, Planetary Society etc. can bring this closer to the people by breaking down such policy into things which today’s youth can understand and offer implications of these actions on them.
    3. The third thing is to get involved in projects. Projects are much better way to understand the complexities that a space scientist faces during his design and fabrication. Taking part in a project is also a good excuse for an educational institution to develop their own infrastructure. But it does take a lot of effort and hard work, but it’s fun.
    4. The fourth thing is events. These are the best platforms to showcase what you have done in your sphere of interest. It is also a place to make the public involved in your activities and even if just for a moment, to share the thrill that members of organisations get to have daily. This is also a place where organisations grow with people wanting to have the thrill for the rest of the year and possibly, rest of their life time.

    All in all, this is not a complete roadmap to changing around a space programme into a direction where timelines can crushed to get things done faster. This is just enough to get a swell of ground support so that what you do matters to people with power and money to get your work done.

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  • Chandrayaan 1 countdown begins

    This article originally appeared on my blog http://pradx.wordpress.com. I recovered the post using Wayback Machine.

    After what is termed as a “dress rehersal” yesterday night succeeded, Chandrayaan-1’s countdown should have started up today morning. I think what they are referring to as a dress rehersal is going through all the steps of the launch right up to the final step without actually launching the launch vehicle (just a fancy technical name for a rocket with a payload). Things have now moved into their final phase.

    Space bloggers like Emily Lakdawalla is claiming the difficulty in getting images of Chandrayaan I online. It might be difficult to see a total lack of images or information after being used to bombarded with information via websites and mailing lists. ISRO doesn’t have a good website or a good mailing list. ISRO’s Chandrayaan I website may have been well designed but it hasn’t been updated for the past 17 months. 

    One of the claims that this mission was supposed to do, was to encourage excitement among the younger generation for the space sciences. This was iterated several times by the Prime Minister himself. Looking at the number of people online today, I believe that ISRO should have presented their stuff online in a much more better way than has been  done. For this historic launch too, everything has been left for the media to piece and stitch together. I believe mediapersons were given a grand tour of the launch site at Sriharikota, but nothing significant has come out of it.

    There are a few people working though. Times of India’s Srinivas Laxman’s coverage (see related stories for the latest) has been outstanding, though not well timed with the launch. NDTV’s Pallava Bagla, who also co-wrote a book has some excellent coverage and a good dedicated website for India’s Moon Yatra.

    In the CitizenSpace efforts to popularize Chandrayaan I launch, my friend, Raghunandan (Planetary Society, India) constant pleas for material on Chandrayaan almost fell on deaf ears. The electronic data that he now has in his hands is, in his words, “quite awesome”. He is now in transit, trying to get an unofficial glimpse of the Chandrayaan I launch. He hasn’t been able to put the content online but will be happy to forward the material to you after the launch. Catch him on his email id – planetarysocietyindia (at) gmail (dot) com. 

    I am also planning to carry a series of articles on how students today can benefit from Chandrayaan I’s launch on October 22 in a series of six articles on the SEDS India blog. To sign off, the media is the best place to catch the latest action in the Chandrayaan I launch arena. I’ve tried my best to try and get some of the content online and I accept, failed but I hope the lessons I have learnt enroute will help me in future launches.

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  • People behind Chandrayaan-1

    On Chandrayaan I’s coverage on NDTV there are exclusive interviews with the scientists and technicians who have made the various online instruments on board Chandrayaan I.

    1. Dr. Mylswamy Annadurai – He’s the Project Director of Chandrayaan I. There was a small note about him in the Times of India. He said designing Chandrayaan 1 was like writing lyrics for a set tune. He’s also from a district next door to my home town. He’s from near Pollachi, Coimbatore.
    2. J A Kamlakar – an expert on LASERS. His instrument on board Chandrayaan I will help measure height variation on the moon’s surface.
    3. Dr. Manuel Grande – Principal Investigator CIXS ( Chandrayaan I Xray Sepctrometer). Doug Ellison made an animation on this instrument.
    4. Dr. Urs Mall – SIR 2 (Near Infra Red Spectrometer)
    5. Dr. Stas Barabash – SARA

    I’m sure that the names indicate to you the international team that has instruments on board the Chandrayaan I. It is a special feeling to have your instruments on board a space craft and to see it fly and I hope every one of you gets an opportunity to have that experience. The last rant doesn’t mean that the technology and people behind Chandrayaan 1 isn’t cool, just that it would be a lot cooler if they shared some of their thoughts with us.

    The specialised NDTV page on Chandrayaan is here.

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  • Impact of Space Debris, 50 Years after Space Age

    Building and launching satellites is all fun. But, after it has surpassed its usefulness it basically stays there in orbit. There are a few things that can be done to ensure that satellites are de-orbited after use.

    India’s own space debris policy was presented in a paper in the Current Science Magazine. India is a member of two organisations that deals with the problems of space debris – United Nations Committee on Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (UNCOPUOS) and the Inter-Agency Space Debris Co-ordination Committee (IADC). A recent paper by V Adimurthy, M Y S Prasad and S K Shivakumar titled “Space Mission Planning and Operations”, published in the Current Science magazine in Vol. 93 No. 12, had this to say on the topic:

    In the design of PSLV final stage, which uses earth-storable liquid propellants, a propellant venting system has been designed. ISRO’s launch vehicle, GSLV, also employs passivation of the cryogenic upper stage at the end of its useful mission. In the operational phase, the last stage of PSLV has been  passivated beginning with PSLV-C4, which was successfully launched in September 2002. With the implementation of this passivation, the possibility of on-orbit fragmentation has been minimized in all the future flights of PSLV. India’s launch vehicles, PSLV and GSLV, and the satellites IRS, INSAT and GSAT series are designed in such a way that no  operational debris is created in the launch and deployment phases of the mission.

    That seems to be pretty comprehensive. The paper further states that most of the Indian satellites are re-robited “on a case-by-case basis, consistent with national service requirements”. ISRO also has developed a space debris proximity analysis software that it uses regularily to keep a watch on currently active satellites, planning launch windows and launches with minimum debris and study the break-up fragmentation during launch.

    BBC World Service (radio) is broadcasting a series called One Planet. The topic for this week is Space Debris.

    Go to the above link for an audio preview. You can also generally listen to the show online but it’s not as fun as listening to it on radio is much more fun.

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