My Science School

September 24, 2014:

The Mars Orbiter Mission (Mangalyaan), India’s first interplanetary mission, entered the orbit of the Red Planet, making India the first country to achieve this feat in its first attempt. Mangalyaan was launched on November 5, 2013, by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO). Initially, the mission was to last only six months, but ISRO extended it further and the orbiter continues to send data till today. Based on the thousands of pictures of the planet and its two moons Phobos and Deimos sent by the orbiter, ISRO has prepared a Martian Atlas.

May 23, 2016:

The ISRO successfully launched a Reusable Launch Vehicle (RLV) Technology Demonstrator mission. With this flight, critical technologies such as autonomous navigation, guidance & control, reusable thermal protection system and re-entry mission management were validated. The fully developed RLV is expected to take off vertically like a rocket, deploy a satellite in orbit, return to Earth, and land on a runway.

February 14, 2017:

The ISRO achieved a major milestone, with the successful record-setting launch of 104 satellites on a single rocket. The Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) blasted off with three satellites from India and 101 smaller nano satellites from five other countries: the U.S., the Netherlands, Israel, Kazakhstan and Switzerland. This number crushed the previous record of 37 satellite sent into orbit aboard a single Russian Dnepr rocket in June 2014.

July 5, 2018:

The ISRO successfully carried out Pad Abort Test to quality Crew Escape System required for Human Spaceflight. The system is an emergency measure designed to quickly pull away the crew module along with the astronauts to a safe distance from the launch vehicle if the mission gets aborted.

August 15, 2018:

Narendra Modi in his Independence Day speech said India’s first manned space mission, Gaganyaan, will be launched by 2022. Sivan, chairman of the ISRO, said that though the target was challenging, it was doable. The work on the mission began in 2004 and most of the key technologies are in place. The 10,000 crore project will launch three Indian astronauts to circle Earth at a distance of about 300400 km from the surface for up to seven days. The crew is expected to commence its journey in December 2021 on a GSLV MkIII rocket.

August 20, 2018:

In a major breakthrough, NASA’s instrument aboard India’s first lunar spacecraft Chandrayaan-1 helped confirm the presence of frozen water deposits in the darkest and coldest parts of the Moon. This discovery has wide-reaching implications for future lunar settlements and exploratory missions. The findings were published on August 20, 2018, more than 10 years after the spacecraft’s launch in 2008. Chandrayaan-1 operated till August 2009, when controllers lost communication with the spacecraft. In March 2017, NASA scientists said they had located Chandrayaan-1 in a polar orbit that was about 200 km above the lunar surface.

July 22, 2019:

The ISRO launched the much-awaited second lunar exploration mission Chandrayaan 2 to map and study the variations in lunar surface compositions. The craft reached the Moon’s orbit on August 20, 2019, and began orbital positioning manoeuvres for the landing of the Vikram lander on the near side of the Moon, in the south polar region. However, Vikram failed to make a successful landing as it deviated from its intended trajectory and lost communication when touchdown confirmation was expected. Anyhow, the Chandrayaan-2 orbiter will continue its mission to study the lunar atmosphere and attempt to estimate the quantity of iced water on the Moon.

 

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On October 18, 2019, NASA astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir created history by completing the first-ever all-female spacewalk. The astronauts stepped outside the International Space Station and replaced a battery discharge unit that failed to activate after new lithium-ion batteries were installed on the station’s exterior structure. The historic moment was originally supposed to occur in March that year, but the event was postponed due to lack of spacesuits for women. Still, the first all-woman spacewalk is a milestone worth celebrating as the agency looks forward to putting the first woman on the Moon by 2024 with its Artemis lunar exploration programme.

Today marks Koch's fourth spacewalk and Meir's first spacewalk. Koch led the EVA and can be identified by the red stripes on her spacesuit and life support backpack. Meir arrived at the space station in September, and both Koch and Meir joined NASA's astronaut corps in 2013. Their astronaut class, nicknamed the "Eight Balls," had the highest percentage of women of any group of astronaut candidates to date.

 

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Scientist released the first-ever image of a black hole, captured by the Event Horizon Telescope, a network of eight linked telescopes on April 10, 2019. This could safely be called the biggest scientific feat of the decade. Before this, every image of a black hole we saw online or in print was an illustration. This image is a direct proof of the existence of black holes. The fuzzy doughnut-shaped ring of gas and dust traces the outline of a supermassive black hole at the heart of the Messier 87 galaxy, 55 million light years from Earth. With a mass 6.5 billion times that of the Sun; it is a humongous black hole.

Black holes are regions in space, where the gravity is so immense that even light cannot escape from their grasp. The boundary around the mouth of the black hole beyond which nothing can escape is called event horizon. It traps everything that comes to this point.

Black holes are formed when giant stars explode at the end of their life-cycle. This explosion is called a supernova. When a star collapse under its own weight, it results in the concentration of a huge amount of mass densely packed in an incredibly small area. Think of a star ten times more massive than the Sun squeezed into a sphere approximately the diameter of Bengaluru. The region is so dense that it warps the fabric of space and time.

Black holes can grow huge as they continue to attract light, dust and gas around them. They can even absorb other stars.

 

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On November 15, 2018 NASA, officially bid farewell to its iconic planet hunter, the Kepler Space Telescope, as it ran of fuel. Peering into deep space, the observatory discovered as many as 2,662 exoplanets in just nine years. The Kepler Space Telescope was launched in 2009 to find out how many earth-sized planets are there in the habitable zones of other stars in the Milky-way. Kepler hunted planets in a surprisingly straightforward manner. By fixating on a specific area of the sky in the constellation Cygnus, Kepler was able to continuously monitor the varying brightnesses of roughly 150,000 stars.

Although Kepler is now retired, its successor, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has already begun operation. Launched on April 18, 2018, TESS carries forward Kepler’s planet-hunting legacy by searching for exoplanets around nearly 200,000 of the brightest and nearest stars to Earth.

 

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On August 12, 2018, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe was launched with the mission of repeatedly probing and making observations of the outer corona of the Sun. On October 29, 2018, the spacecraft became the closest ever artificial object to the Sun. Its trajectory includes seven Venus flybys over nearly seven years to gradually shrink its elliptical orbit around the Sun. The spacecraft will undertake 24 orbits around the Sun. With this mission, scientists seeks to solve two long-standing puzzles; how the stream of particles flowing continuously from the sun, known as the solar wind, is accelerated to its tremendous velocities; and why the sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona, is so much hotter than its surface.

Parker Solar Probe will use seven Venus flybys over nearly seven years to gradually shrink its orbit around the Sun, coming as close as 3.83 million miles (and 6.16 million kilometers) to the Sun, well within the orbit of Mercury and about seven times closer than any spacecraft has come before.

Parker Solar Probe is a true mission of exploration; for example, the spacecraft will go close enough to the Sun to watch the solar wind speed up from subsonic to supersonic, and it will fly through the birthplace of the highest-energy solar particles.

 

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On October 19, 2017, Scientists detected the first known alien visitor, named Oumuamua, passing through our Solar System. It was about 33 million km from Earth (about 85 times as far away as the Moon), and already heading away from the Sun. The interstellar object was relatively flat and cigar-shaped. Astonomers aren’t exactly sure where it came from, or really even what it is. However, in July 2019, astronomers reported that Oumuamua was an object of a purely natural origin. (Oumuamua in Hawaiian means “scout” or “visitor from after arriving first”.)

The Spitzer Space Telescope did not detect any heat in the form of infrared radiation from ‘Oumuamua. Given the surface temperature dictated by ‘Oumuamua’s trajectory near the sun, this sets an upper limit on its size of hundreds of meters. Based on this size limit, ‘Oumuamua must be unusually shiny, with a reflectance that is at least 10 times higher than exhibited by solar system asteroids.

 

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NASA’s Cassini spacecraft made a fateful plunge into the atmosphere of Saturn, ending its 13-year tour on September 15, 2017. Cassini was launched in 1997 to orbit and observe the ringed planet and its many moons. The spacecraft arrived at Saturn in 2004. NASA extended its mission twice – first for two years, and then for seven more. The second mission extension saw dozens of flybys of the planet’s icy moons, using the spacecraft’s remaining rocket propellant along the way. Cassini discovered half a dozen moons, geysers on Enceladus and lakes on Titan.

During planning for its extended missions, various future plans for Cassini were evaluated on the basis of scientific value, cost, and time. Some of the options examined included collision with Saturn atmosphere, an icy satellite, or rings; another was departure from Saturn orbit to Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune, or a centaur. Other options included leaving it in certain stable orbits around Saturn, or departure to a heliocentric orbit. Each plan required certain amounts of time and changes in velocity.

Scientific data was collected using eight of its twelve science instruments. All of the probe's magnetosphere and plasma science instruments, plus the spacecraft's radio science system, and its infrared and ultraviolet spectrometers collected data during the final plunge. The data rates flowing back from Saturn could not support imaging during the final plunge, so all pictures were down linked (transmitted back to Earth) and cameras were switched off, before the final plunge began. The predicted altitude for loss of signal was approximately 1,500 km (930 mi) above Saturn's cloud tops, when the spacecraft began to tumble and burn up like a meteor.

 

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On August 24, 2016, Astronomers announced the detection of Proxima b, an Earth-sized exoplanet in the habitable zone of the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Sun. The planet, called Proxima b, is rocky and might be warm enough to host liquid water, and thus be habitable. Proxima Centauri is 4.25 light years from Earth and likely to be 30% more massive than Earth. Proxima Centauri is a small, red dwarf star and shines much less fiercely than the Sun.

Despite its proximity, scientists still know very little about Proxima Centauri's planetary companion, besides that its mass is at least 1.3 times that of Earth and that it goes around its parent star every 11 days. Therefore, Del Genio and his colleagues had to make some reasonable guesses about the exoplanet Proxima Centauri b — namely, that it had an atmosphere and an ocean on its surface — for their work to proceed.

 

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Scientists announced that they had made the first direct detection of gravitational waves on February 11, 2016. However, the observation had been made in September 2015. Albert Einstein had said that something special happens when two bodies – such as planets or stars - - orbit each other. He believed that this kind of movement could cause ripples in space. He called it the gravitational waves and described it in his general relativity theory in 1915. But it took about 100 years for scientists to get concrete proof of their existence. Scientists observed these gravitational waves produced by the collision of two neutron stars some 130 million light years away using a very sensitive instrument called LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory) in the U.S. The explanation goes that these waves rippled through the universe, effectively warping the fabric of space-time, before passing through Earth as faint traces of their former, violent origins.

 

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The first food grown and harvested in space – a crop of red lettuce – was eaten by astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) on August 10, 2015. The lettuce was grown for 15 months with a system called Veg-01, which uses red, blue, and green LED lights to grow plants in a small space. The growth of plants in outer space has elicited much scientific interest. In January 2016, U.S. astronauts announced that a zinnia had blossomed aboard the ISS. Growing plants in space is an active area of research. The latest being the experiments conducted by China’s Chang’s 4 lunar lander. On January 15, 2019, it was reported that cottonseed, rapeseed, and potato seeds had sprouted in the Lunar Micro Ecosystem, a sealed biosphere cylinder that Chang’e-4 had carried with it.

“There is evidence that supports fresh foods, such as tomatoes, blueberries and red lettuce, are a good source of antioxidants,” Ray Wheeler, the project’s lead researcher, told NASA’s website. “Having fresh food like these available in space could have a positive impact on people’s moods and also could provide some protection against radiation in space.”

 

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On 14 July, 2015, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft successfully flew past Pluto, the icy dwarf planet on July 14, 2015. This was the first time that Pluto and its moon Charon were studied up close. Notably, scientists discovered that Pluto has an adorable heart on its surface. The spacecraft was launched in 2006 with the primary mission to perform a flyby study of the Pluto system.

After the Pluto flyby, New Horizons was maneuvered for a flyby of a Kuiper belt object 486958 Arrokoth (nicknamed Ultima Thule). On January 1, 2019, the spacecraft flew by the icy world which is 6.5 billion km away from Earth. Arrokoth is a contact binary consisting of two lobes attached by a bright, narrow neck, and is now the most distant object humans have ever explored.

 

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On August 6, 2014, The Rosetta Spacecraft from the European Space Agency (ESA) reached the orbit of comet 67/Churyumov- Gerasimenko. It became the first spacecraft to orbit a comet, and to deploy a lander, Philae, on its surface (on November 12, 2014). But the touchdown did not go entirely as planned as Philae bounced off 67P’s surface twice and finally settled in a shady spot on the comet. It managed to gather a great deal of data about 67P for about 57 hours before its battery ran out due to reduced sunlight at the crash site. On November 15, 2014, Philae entered safe mode, or hibernation. The mission evoked so much interest among common people that farewell message poured in for Philae on social media when the ESA decided to end its mission in July 2015. However, the mothership Rosetta continued to remain in orbit around the comet 67/P until September 30, 2016.

Comet 67P orbits the sun once every 6.5 years, making its closest approach to the sun in August 2015. Since then, the comet (and Rosetta) has been traveling farther and farther away from the sun. The mission has to come to an end soon, as Rosetta's solar panels will no longer be able to power the spacecraft. The probe is not designed to survive the landing, or even to withstand gravity; at the moment of impact, Rosetta will be crushed and its signal will go dark, ESA managers said. 

 

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On April 17, 2014, NASA announced the discovery of Kepler-186f, the first Earth-sized exoplanet to be found within the habitable zone of its host star. Kepler-186f is orbiting the red dwarf Kepler-186, about 582 light years from Earth. The star hosts four other planets. However, Kepler-186 b, c, d, and e are not habitable as they are very close to their star. They are considered too hot to have liquid water and to host life. Kepler-186f orbits its star compared to what Earth gets from the Sun. The discovery was seen as s significant steps towards finding worlds like planet Earth.

The four companion planets, Kepler-186b, Kepler-186c, Kepler-186d, and Kepler-186e, whiz around their sun every four, seven, 13, and 22 days, respectively, making them too hot for life as we know it. These four inner planets all measure less than 1.5 times the size of Earth.

The next steps in the search for distant life include looking for true Earth-twins -- Earth-size planets orbiting within the habitable zone of a sun-like star -- and measuring their chemical compositions. The Kepler Space Telescope, which simultaneously and continuously measured the brightness of more than 150,000 stars, is NASA's first mission capable of detecting Earth-size planets around stars like our sun.

 

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On December 1, 2013, China launched the Chang’e-3 lunar rover mission on December 1, 2013. The unmanned spacecraft became the first spacecraft to ‘soft-land’ on the Moon since 1976. The spacecraft entered the elliptic orbit on Dec 10, 2013, and landed on the lunar surface on December 14, 2013. Soon after the touchdown in the Mare Imbrium, a small six-wheeled, solar-powered Yutu rover was deployed and driven across the airless surface. But Yutu stopped moving from December 16. However, its instruments continued to function till March 2015, sending back valuable information about the Moon to scientists.

In the landing sequence, the Chang’e-3 lander is dropped from an altitude of 4 m above the lunar surface which required a cushioning landing system on the lander to create a fairly soft landing. The system also has to support the rover release that is performed after landing. A “cantilever-type” design has been selected for Chang’e-3.

The landing system utilizes four primary landing legs that are equipped with footpads to avoid sinking into the surface. The Chinese used previous lander designs and knowledge on the properties of the lunar dust to develop a landing system that minimizes mass while maximizing stability.

The primary landing struts facilitate bumpers with interior buffer elements to provide shock-absorbing capabilities. The legs are installed at an angle of 30º to the lander structure. Multi-functional and single-functional secondary struts are attached to the landing legs to provide additional attach points to the lander body.

 

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On February 15, 2013, A powerful meteor broke up over the city of Chelyabinsk, Russia, on Feb. 15, 2013, producing powerful shockwaves which shattered glasses, injured over 1490 people and damaged over 4,300 buildings. The blast scattered meteor shards across the region and left big holes in the ice- covered Lake Chebarkul. Chelyabinsk, as the meteor came to be known, was no ordinary rock. It was a superbolide, an extremely bright meteor capable of exploding in the atmosphere. It entered Earth at a speed of 69,000 km/h and was observed over a wide area of the region. The same day a 130-foot asteroid called 2012 DA14 gave Earth a close shave, missing our planet by just 27,000 km. But the two space rocks are unrelated.

In the next 10 million years, large rock pieces (along with some dust) combined to create an asteroid about 60 miles (100 km) wide, Kring said. This parent body sustained a large impact with another space object about 125 million years after the solar system was formed, with more strikes coming during the "late heavy bombardment" period — a time of frequent small-body strikes that occurred between 3.8 billion and 4.3 billion years ago. Two other impacts have come in the last 500 million years. Closer to the Chelyabinsk event, the parent body experienced yet another impact and was also nudged out of the main asteroid belt into an orbit that crossed near Earth's.

Initially, the Chelyabinsk bolide was thought to be part of 1999 NC43, an asteroid that's 1.24 miles (2 km) wide, but the orbit and mineral composition between the two bodies turned out to be different. In April 2015, a study in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society suggested Chelyabinsk had been a part of asteroid 2014 UR116.

 

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