Category Astronomy

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.

 

Picture Credit : Google

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.

 

Picture Credit : Google