According to NASA, the liftoff is scheduled for Saturday at 1:17 p.m. EDT (10:47 pm IST) from Space Launch Complex-40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.

“This is the first human spaceflight mission to launch from that pad,” the US space agency said.

The Crew-9 was initially expected to launch on Thursday but was postponed due to poor weather caused by Hurricane Helene, which is currently impacting the Gulf Coast of Florida.

The flight will carry NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov to the orbiting laboratory for about five-month science mission. They will return to Earth in February along with Williams and Butch Willmore.

Williams and Willmore travelled to the ISS on an eight-day sojourn on the faulty Boeing Starliner. While NASA declared the Starliner unfit for human travel and it returned safely to Earth, the astronaut duo is stuck in space.

Meanwhile, NASA’s Flight Readiness Review confirmed that all systems are “go” for the launch, ensuring that the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft are ready for this critical mission.

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For the first time since the May 2020 test flight, SpaceX is launching two astronauts to the ISS on a Dragon spacecraft.

In a bid to make room for Williams and Willmore in the orbiting lab, NASA had removed two other Crew-9 members: commander Zena Cardman and three-time shuttle flier Stephanie Wilson.

The Crew-9 mission will fly with two empty spacecraft, each carrying extra cargo and supplies, including a new Dragon spacesuit for Wilmore (one for Williams is already aboard the ISS).

The targeted docking time is approximately 5:30 p.m. Sunday (3.30 am Monday), NASA said.

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–IANS

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The Cabinet, chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, approved the mission to Venus for scientific exploration.

According to a Cabinet communique, the mission, expected to launch in March 2028, will help unravel the “Venusian atmosphere and geology and generate large amounts of science data probing into its thick atmosphere.”

The Cabinet has also “approved a fund of Rs 1,236 crore for the VOM, of which Rs 824 crore will be spent on the spacecraft.”

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“The cost includes development and realisation of the spacecraft including its specific payloads and technology elements, global ground station support cost for navigation and network as well as the cost of the launch vehicle,” the Cabinet said.

Venus, the closest planet to Earth, is believed to have formed in conditions similar to Earth. The Venus Orbiter Mission presents a unique opportunity to understand how planetary environments can evolve differently. It could provide crucial insights into the causes of Venus’ transformation from a potentially habitable planet to its current state, which is vastly different from Earth.

The Department of Space will accomplish the VOM mission and is envisaged to orbit a scientific spacecraft in the orbit of planet Venus.

“ISRO will be responsible for the development and launch of the spacecraft. The project will be effectively managed and monitored through the established practices prevailing at ISRO. The data generated from the mission would be disseminated to the scientific community through existing mechanisms,” the Cabinet communique said.

The Venus Orbiter Mission is not just a standalone endeavour. It is a stepping stone towards India’s future planetary missions with larger payloads and optimal orbit insertion approaches. The knowledge and experience gained from this mission will be invaluable in shaping India’s future in space exploration.

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–IANS

On August 23 last year, India became the fourth country to land on the moon and the first to reach its southern polar region. Following this accomplishment, Prime Minister Modi announced that the country would observe this day as National Space Day every year.

PM Modi’s vision and encouragement

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision for space development and reforms takes centre stage, highlighting their pivotal role in last year’s Chandrayaan-3 mission’s success. Leading scientists across the nation lauded the Prime Minister following the mission’s achievement, and their interactions with PM Modi were both inspiring and indicative of deep contemplation in this direction.

ISRO Chairman S. Somanath said in a video message that the Prime Minister has strengthened the country’s space ecosystem through policy intervention.

He has undertaken many initiatives to reform the space sector as prime minister. The National Space Policy was announced, and the roles and responsibilities of the Department of Space were delineated. Similarly, under the new foreign direct investment policy for the space sector, private and foreign investments are now allowed with specific controls and regulations, which was not possible earlier, Somanath said.

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Regarding geospatial policy, the ISRO chief said that all geospatial data and satellite data are now made available free of cost, up to five meters, to everybody to create a secondary effect on it. He added that these are three important steps in terms of policy initiatives that the government has taken, piloted by the Prime Minister.

Somanath also recalled a personal moment when Prime Minister Modi took a brief pause from the BRICS summit to witness the live transmission of the Chandrayaan-3 mission’s soft landing on the lunar surface. “I remember our honourable Prime Minister, Modi ji, was there watching live transmission and waving the flag. His personal involvement and emotional investment in these missions are truly inspiring,” Somanath added.

After returning from the BRICS summit, the Prime Minister on August 26 went to the ISRO Telemetry Tracking and Command Network (ISTRAC) in Bengaluru to greet the scientists behind the Chandrayaan-3 mission. That day, Prime Minister Modi announced that August 23 would be commemorated as National Space Day.

B.N. Ramakrishna, Director of ISRO Telemetry, Tracking & Command Network, recalled how Prime Minister Modi boosted the morale of scientists when the Chandrayaan-2 mission’s soft landing failed.

“He (PM Modi) was sitting in the visitors’ gallery, constantly monitoring the various parameters of Chandrayaan-2. Everything was going so smoothly… but we could not land properly on the moon at the last minute, so we had a hard landing… It took some time for all of us to digest. There was a pin-drop silence in the control centre, and the Prime Minister was also watching from the visitors’ gallery,” said Ramakrishna.

He continues, “Then, after four to five minutes, when we were not able to communicate with the lander from our deep space antenna, we had to announce that it was not a soft landing. So the Prime Minister came down from the visitors’ gallery and consoled each of us at that moment because we were experiencing great emotions. We thought that he was not going to come back. And we were all trying to analyse what went wrong… We were still having discussions in the meeting room till 4-5 am about what went wrong and why we did not land properly. At that time, we got a message that the Prime Minister was coming and addressing us at 8 am. He had taken all of us into his confidence and said, ‘failures are part of the success. Do not worry about what you have missed. Please look at it and come back. And I am sure ISRO and India will be successful…’ So that was the kind of assurance he gave. And even he patted our former chairman.”

Sankaran, Director of UR Rao Satellite Centre (URSC), said, “I have been here in ISRO for the last 38 years. The main difference I see in the approach of ISRO is that earlier, what we do, how we do it, was not really known to anybody; only the outcome of that as a service was made available to the concerned departments or public, whatever it is. So, it only concentrated on the outcome. But nowadays, we see that not only is the outcome essential, but what we are doing should also reach the public. It should be known to the public. That is the change I am seeing in recent years.”

According to Sankaran, Prime Minister Modi was “very clear that we have to involve other than government agencies in the space activities that… finally resulted in the space sector reforms.”

ISRO Scientist Pavithra Shinde, a key member of the Chandrayaan-3 mission, recalled how the Prime Minister suggested naming the landing site of Chandrayaan-3 as the ‘Shiv Shakti Point’. This not only highlighted the Prime Minister’s emphasis on women’s power but also the significant role of women in India’s space programme, making the audience feel the inclusivity and diversity in these missions.

Chandrayaan-3 mission

Chandrayaan-3, a mission aimed at furthering India’s exploration of the moon, was launched from Satish Dhawan Space Centre on July 14, 2023. The spacecraft successfully entered lunar orbit on August 5 and became the first lander to touch down near the lunar South Pole on August 23, marking a significant milestone in India’s space exploration journey.

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–IANS

(Photo: IANS/PIB)

According to NASA, the Moon will seem full from Sunday morning until early Wednesday morning. For travellers going eastward from Nepal across Asia, including India and Australia, the Moon will peak on Tuesday morning.

India will be able to witness the celestial event on August 19 and 20 during the night and early hours of August 20. This year, there will be four consecutive supermoons.

The term “supermoon,” coined by astrologer Richard Nolle in 1979, refers to a new or full Moon that occurs when the Moon is within 90 percent of its closest approach to Earth. These full supermoons, with their breathtaking size and brightness, are a sight to behold and are the biggest and brightest full Moons of the year.

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This full Moon is also a Blue Moon, a term that dates back to 1528 and has various speculated origins. It refers to the third full Moon in a season with four full Moons. Although it won’t appear blue, the term ‘Blue Moon’ is believed to have originated from an old English phrase meaning ‘betrayer Moon’ or a reference to rare atmospheric conditions that make the Moon appear blue.

The August Full Moon is traditionally known as the Sturgeon Moon by the Algonquin tribes, named after the large fish easily caught this time of year. Other names for this Moon include the Red Moon, Corn Moon, Barley Moon, and Herb Moon..

For science fiction fans, this Sturgeon Moon is a nod to author Theodore Sturgeon, known for his contributions to Star Trek.

The next supermoon in 2024 will occur on September 17, also known as the Harvest Moon.

Earth will also partially eclipse it during the night as a portion of it passes into Earth’s shadow.

The third full moon of the year will occur on October 17. Known as Hunter’s Moon, it will also be the year’s closest full moon. The last supermoon of the year will occur on November 15.

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After finding water in an astronaut's helmet, NASA has suspended all, except the most urgent spacewalks, the agency officials have announced.

Water was found in the helmet worn by European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Matthias Maurer following a March 23 spacewalk, Space.com reported.

Maurer reported about 20 to 25 centimetres of water in a very thin layer, covering the helmet's inner surface.

Although the suit sometimes does generate a bit of water, but "this was a bit beyond what our normal experience faces. It was specifically the quantity of water that got our attention," Dana Weigel, deputy station programme manager at NASA's Johnson Space Centre in Houston, said during a press conference this week.

The agency officials said they will perform an assessment of its extravehicular mobility unit (EMU) spacesuits, which will return to Earth in July.

It means the astronauts will not be able to go outside and perform extravehicular activities (EVAs) for several months unless there is a pressing need for repairs on the International Space Station, the report said.

"Until we understand better what the causal factors might have been during the last EVA with our EMU, we are no-go for nominal EVA," Weigel said.

Meanwhile, the recent SpaceX's Crew-4 mission and Boeing's uncrewed Orbital Flight Test-2 have carried More helmet absorption pads to the orbiting lab. These may help in case the astronauts need to repair something in space before the investigation concludes, Weigel said.

"We have supplemental … very thin kind of absorptive pads that we can put on the inside of the helmet," Weigel said. "One of them is towards the back of the crew headset, and the other one is kind of a band that goes up over the head. [It's] kind of like in the shape of a headband, but it's attached to the inner layer of the helmet bubble. And so that would offer some mitigation."

This is, however, not the first incident where spacewalks have been suspended due to unexpected water leakage.

It occurred for the first time in July 2013, when ESA astronaut Luca Parmitano experienced a severe water leak that ended up covering most of his face. His spacewalk with NASA's Chris Cassidy was cut short due to the water volume Parmitano was reporting, roughly an hour after starting the work, the report said.

NASA ultimately determined that the materials intruded "because a water filtering facility at Johnson [Space Centre] had not been managed to control for silica," NASA's Office of the Inspector General (OIG) wrote in April 2017. "As a result," the OIG continued, "silica-laden water was used in the processing of flight hardware filters that later was used in four on-orbit spacesuits."

The agency addressed the silica situation and also created backups for astronauts in case of leaks. Starting in 2014, astronauts used a "helmet absorption pad" at the back of the helmet to absorb excess water. In addition, a breathing tube was inserted in the helmet in case of water clinging to the face, as it tends to do in microgravity.

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Australian astronomers and space engineers are seeking to use a space telescope capable of discovering new planets in Earth's "nearest neighbour", Alpha Centauri.

In unveiling the project on Wednesday, Professor Peter Tuthill from the Sydney Institute for Astronomy at the University of Sydney said the telescope would open a "new window on the universe".

In particular, the researchers, including teams from the US and Europe, will focus on Alpha Centauri more than four light years from Earth, which is the closest star system to our own solar system, Xinhua news agency reported.

"We want to concentrate our efforts on this one, very special star system – Earth's nearest neighbour – rather than playing the odds with bigger populations of distant stars where lucky breaks can reveal planets to astronomers by other techniques," Tuthill told Xinhua.

Astronomers know that Alpha Centauri consists of three stars, two of which are very much like the Sun, and these present a tantalizing possibility in the ultimate quest to find a planet capable of supporting life.

"These next-door planets are the ones where we have the best prospects for finding and analyzing atmospheres, surface chemistry and possibly even the fingerprints of a biosphere — the tentative signals of life," Tuthill said.

The Telescope for Orbit Locus Interferometric Monitoring of the Astronomical Neighbourhood (TOLIMAN) would use a new technology called a "diffractive pupil" that helps with the exquisitely precise measurements on the captured starlight needed to detect rocky Earth-like planets around the system's "Goldilocks zone".

"If you're too far away from your host star, you're a frozen snowball," Tuthill told the national broadcaster ABC. "If you're too close, you get baked. So you want that 'Goldilocks' just-right orbit."

The project has received guidance from Sydney-based space engineering company Saber Astronautics which will also provide operational support when the telescope is launched into orbit, most probably in 2023.

Chief executive Jason Held said Australians should be proud of the mission as it was "an exciting, bleeding-edge space telescope" that "will be a joy to fly."

"In order for it to deliver the science we want, it will need to be in orbit above the Earth for a couple of years before we've accumulated good enough data to tell whether there's a planet in the system or not," Tuthill said.

Speaking to the ABC, Tuthill said if a habitable planet was discovered, it could ultimately lead to future space exploration.

"Four light years is a very long way away for our present technologies but if you allow us to dream a little bit and gaze into the future several generations… then humanity is going to want to leap those voids."

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For the first time in its space exploration mission, an evasive measure was carried out recently to avoid the collision between Chandrayaan-2 Orbiter and US' Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) said.

According to ISRO, Chandrayaan-2 Orbiter and National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) LRA were predicted to come very close to each other on October 20, 2021 near the Lunar North pole.

Calculations by ISRO and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) showed that the radial separation between the two spacecraft would be less than 100 m and the closest approach distance would be only about three km on October 20, 2021 at 11.15 am Indian time.

ISRO and NASA agreed that the situation warranted a collision avoidance manoeuvre and as per the mutual agreement between the two agencies Chandrayaan-2 Orbiter was moved away on Oct 18, 2021 ensuring a sufficiently large radial separation at the next closest conjunction between the two spacecraft.

According to ISRO, after orbit determination of Chandrayaan-2 Orbiter post-manoeuvre tracking data, it was reconfirmed that there would be no further close conjunctions with LRO in the near future with the achieved orbit.

Both the orbiters orbit the moon in a nearly polar orbit and hence, both the spacecraft come close to each other over the Lunar poles.

The Indian Orbiter has been going around the moon for the past two years.

It is common for satellites in earth orbit to undergo collision avoidance manoeuvres to mitigate collision risk due to space objects including space debris and operational spacecraft.

In 2020, India's 700 kg cartography satellite Cartosat-2F and Russia's 450 kg Kanopus-V satellite had a near miss in outer space, said Roscosmos, Russia's state space corporation.

Both the earth observation satellites were as close as 224 metres.

Kanopus is an Earth observation with a launch mass of 450 kg mini-satellite mission of the Russian Space Agency.

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We live on a beautiful planet called earth, along with a wide variety of living organisms. The earth, is part of the vast universe. The universe is about 15 to 20 billion years old. The age of the earth is approximately 4 to 5 billion years, while human beings evolved around 2 million years ago. The widely accepted theory of the origin of universe is the ‘Big Bang’ theory. According to this theory, universe started with a huge explosion and matter like dust and gases filled the entire space. The temperature of the universe then, was around hundred billion degrees Celsius.

Scientists believed that the Big Bang occurred about 15 to 20 billion years ago. The huge collection of dust and gases then began to spin. As it spun faster and faster, the center of the solar system became very hot and it became the Sun. From the Sun, big blobs or chunks of dust broke off and formed eight ball shaped planets. The earth broke off about 4.5 billion years ago with an explosion. It was a burning hot white mass of gas and dust. Over a long period of time, dust and gas gradually condensed to form solid rock.

The crust of the earth was formed from cooling and hardening of the molten matter and hot gases. With cooling of the earth, the crust hardened and formed the land. The cooling of the earth also condensed water vapor into liquid water filling the depressions to form the seas. “The earth with its blue skies, vast oceans and lush green forests is the home to wide variety of organisms. It has its own unique atmosphere. The atmosphere also helps to regulate the ambient temperature which is suitable for supporting life. If you could dig a deep hole into earth the deeper you go, the hotter it becomes”.

In the beginning, i.e., more than 4.6 billion years ago, the world was a ball of burning gas, spinning through space. At first, super-heated gases were able to escape into outer space, but as the Earth cooled, they were held by gravity to form the early atmosphere. Clouds soon began to develop as water vapor collected in the air, and then it began to rain, that caused the early oceans to rise up. It took hundreds of millions of years for the first land masses to emerge. Earth's first continents may have risen out of the ocean around 700 million years ago.

About 250 million years ago, long after the Earth was formed, all the continents of the time had joined together to form a super-continent called Pangaea, which broke up about 200 million years ago to form two giant continents, called Gondwana and Laurasia. Gondwana comprised what is now Africa, South America, Australia, Antarctica and India. The Indian Sub-continent was then in the east coast of Africa, before it broke off and moved north quickly. It struck with the continent of Asia, creating one of the world’s greatest mountain ranges, that extended for more than 2,502,500 KM, called the Himalayas. By then, our world had almost started to look like the world of today.

Did you know that the first stable continental land to have risen about 3.2 billion years ago may have been the Singhbhum region of Jharkhand in India? The study was conducted in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). “The team of researchers from India, Australia, and the US had acquired the sandstones in Singhbhum having geological signatures of ancient river channels, tidal plains and beaches over 3.2 billion years old”. 

The study was led by author, Dr. Priyadarshi Chowdhury of Monash University, who said “we realized these were ancient riverine rocks, formed in rivers and estuaries. We had plate tectonics today to control the elevation. When two continents collide, you form the Himalayas, you form the Alps. That wasn't the case 3 billion years ago”. The Singhbhum craton (a large stable block of the earth's crust forming the nucleus of a continent) may have been formed from a pile of lava over time and the crust became so thick that it floated on the water just like an iceberg. 

The team of researchers removed zircon from the Singhbhum sediments. They estimated the age of the rocks by shooting lasers at the zircon and then measuring the relative amounts of elements released. The cratons parallel to that of Singhbhum one, existed in South Africa and Australia also. The researchers were of the view “that the weathering of the cratons would have led to nutrient runoff, supplying the ocean with phosphorus and other building blocks for early life in the planet”.

The scientists believed that once a landmass is created, shallow seas such as lagoons are also created, thereby accelerating the growth of oxygen-producing life forms that may have boosted oxygen in the atmosphere and ocean. The emergence of early continents would also have drawn carbon dioxide down from the atmosphere, leading to localized pockets of cold climate and the formation of glaciers which was the first step towards making the Earth more habitable. 

The astonishing process of plate tectonics, in which the Earth’s land masses move slowly across the Earth’s crust, is still continuing even now. They predicted far in the future, the present continents will join again, to form a new supercontinent.

When that will happen only time will open…

Astronomers have discovered a small black hole outside the Milky Way by looking at how it influences the motion of a star in its close vicinity.

The team at Liverpool John Moores University in the UK used the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (ESO's VLT), situated in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile, to spot the black hole.

The newly found black hole was spotted lurking in NGC 1850, a cluster of thousands of stars roughly 160,000 light years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud — a neighbour galaxy of the Milky Way. The detection in NGC 1850 marks the first time a black hole has been found in a young cluster of stars (the cluster is only around 100 million years old, a blink of an eye on astronomical scales).

According to Sara Saracino from the Liverpool John Moores University's Astrophysics Research Institute, the black hole is roughly 11 times as massive as our Sun. Astronomers started on the trail of this black hole due to its gravitational influence on the five-solar-mass star orbiting it.

Previously such small, "stellar-mass" black holes have been spotted in other galaxies by picking up the X-ray glow emitted as they swallow matter, or from the gravitational waves generated as black holes collide with one another or with neutron stars.

However, most stellar-mass black holes don't give away their presence through X-rays or gravitational waves.

This is the first time this detection method has been used to reveal the presence of a black hole outside of our galaxy. The method could be key to unveiling hidden black holes in the Milky Way and nearby galaxies, and to help shed light on how these mysterious objects form and evolve, the team said.

"Every single detection we make will be important for our future understanding of stellar clusters and the black holes in them," said co-author Mark Gieles from the University of Barcelona, Spain.

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There is an always an eternal debate about the policies a country should implement in order to inspire economic growth. The questions asked are is it better for a government to intervene and choose which industries to develop, or should it allow the private sector to decide what to produce? We heard many success stories of countries that had followed industrial policies, such as the Asian tigers in the 1960s and 1990s, but there are also stories of failure, such as India in the decades prior to the 1990s. What led to the economic miracle in India during the 1990s is the question?

The Indian government sought to encourage industrialization by directing investment toward the production of capital goods and by restricting imports. At the same time, it tried to help its poorest citizens, who lived in villages, due to which the return on capital in the public sector during the 1980s was only 1.5%. The private sector, after independence suffered under other restrictions, including the following:

• Import restrictions that did not permit the free exchange of goods and knowledge.
• Anti-trust laws that did not allow businesses to grow.
• Public monopolies that operated very inefficiently.
• The License Raj, which complicated the process of opening new businesses

So, it is not surprising that GDP per capita grew only at an annual rate of only 3.5% in the years prior to the 1980s. Considering, how poor India was, even in the following decade, the GDP per capita was only $447 in 1985, the growth rates were also alarming. They were not high enough to lift the population out of poverty. Like many other countries that were unable to produce enough to finance their government projects through taxation, India financed itself with public debt. In 1991, the public debt reached $70 billion and India was on the verge of declaring bankruptcy. To avoid this disastrous last resort, India was forced to take immediate action to fix the problem.

In 1991, the Indian government broke with industrial policy, which had failed. In a surprising 180-degree twist, the new policies encouraged business activity, stimulated growth in the private sector, and revived international trade.

Some of the most important measures included:

• Eliminating the industrial license requirement for most sectors;
• Removing limits on capital accumulation;
• Eliminating licenses for importing the majority of goods;
• Reducing tariffs.

• Opening the private sector to many activities that had previously been reserved for the public sector.
• Reducing requirements for bank reserves and restrictions on interest rates.
• Eliminating restrictions on foreign investment.

Liberalization achieved the desired results, as reflected by the following data:

• GDP per capita grew at an annual rate of 6 % in the 1990s, driven by the service sector, which would come to represent 53.5 %of GDP by 1999.
• Exports grew at an annual rate of 17.3 % during the 1990s, in large part because of a boom in the software sector.
• India’s score on the Fraser Institute’s Index of Economic Freedom rose from 4.8 in 1990 to 6.2 in 2000, reflecting remarkable improvements in the freedom to trade internationally.
• Although the economy grew after liberalization, one could argue that this is a coincidence and that the growth was really a belated effect of the previous industrial policies. It could also be argued that economic growth would have occurred even without any policy changes.