Tag Archive for ‘Science’ at Asian Window

Tag Archive for 'Science'

India’s destination moon

Published

on October 21, 2008

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From The Times:

Standing at the bottom of his garden, cup of coffee in hand, Gopinath Garirao, 63, peered into the dawn sky and marvelled as the Indian rocket streaked into orbit, fuelled by the hopes of a billion people.

When he was born in 1945 India was still under British colonial rule and more than two years away from the bloody chaos of Partition.

He joined the Indian Railways as an engineer in 1969 – the year that Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon – and worked there until he retired in 2005, on a pension of £100 a month. He has lived through one war with China and three with Pakistan.

There he was, standing outside with his wife, Kalavati Bai, watching the launch of Chandrayaan1 – India’s first unmanned mission to the Moon – from his own back garden.

: Chandrayaan-1 (meaning “Moon Craft-1”) on its way to the launch pad at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, India. / Indian Space Research Organisation

India launched its first lunar mission from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, about 100 kilometers (63 miles) north of Chennai, at 06:20 am (0050 GMT) Wednesday, October 22, 2008, putting the country in an elite group of nations with the scientific know-how to reach the moon. The 3,000 pound (1,400 kilogram) satellite Chandrayaan-1 will join Japanese and Chinese crafts currently in orbit around the moon for a two-year mission designed to map out the whole lunar surface. AP

The rocket on the launch pad

From BBC:

On an island off the Bay of Bengal in southern India, the mood is upbeat but also slightly tense.

This is the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota – India’s launch pad for its satellite missions.

It’s now being prepared for what is the country’s most ambitious space venture to date, an unmanned mission to the moon.

Its indigenously built satellite, Chandrayaan-1 – the name is Sanskrit for lunar craft – will blast off on an Indian-built rocket, the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle, early on Wednesday.

Click here and here for updates

Beyond The Moon

Mukul Sharma in the Times of India:

But why on earth are we going to the Moon at all and that too at a cost of nearly Rs 400 crore? Surely there are other pressing priorities back home like poverty, literacy, medical care, infrastructure development etc that needs urgent attention and the taxpayers’ money.

Besides, why are we doing this now when others have done it several decades ago? The former Soviet Union and the United States both launched successful lunar orbiting satellites way back in 1966.

We’re told that, among other things, the mission will try to source non-radioactive Helium-3 which is scarce on Earth but believed to be abundant on its natural satellite and is seen as a promising fuel for advanced fusion reactors in the future. Once located, we can transport it back from the moon to run nuclear plants and generate abundant electricity. Apparently, a couple of tonnes of Helium-3 are enough to meet the energy needs of the world. So how come other advanced nations of the world haven’t thought along similar lines?

Authors@Google: Salman Rushdie

Published

asianwindow

on September 19, 2008

in Books

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Good morning. It’s Sun-Earth day today

Published

asianwindow

on July 31, 2008

in Science

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Why will an estimated 15 lakh pilgrims take a holy dip in the Brahm Sarovar at Kurukshetra tomorrow? It’s because of a a rare (though in India, partial) solar eclipse which will be visible starting 4.03 pm. Read the Indian eclipse story in The Hindu here.

But first, what exactly is a solar eclipse anyway? The eclipse occurs when the new moon moves directly between the sun and the earth. The moon’s umbral shadow will fall on parts of Canada, Greenland, the Arctic Ocean, Russia, Mongolia, and China. Science News has some answers here.

And, don’t miss NASA’s live webcast tomorrow from China where a total solar eclipse will begin at 6.09 pm, China time. Click here for the link.

Be warned, if you miss the action, you’ll be waiting until July 22, 2009 for the next total solar eclipse.

Finally, to understand the significance of solar (and lunar) eclipses in both Hinduism and Islam click here and here.

Take a deep breath — and thank Mount Everest

Published

asianwindow

on July 31, 2008

in environment

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From Science Now:

Next time you pause to view a scenic mountain vista, consider that the oxygen your lungs are taking in resulted from the same process that raised those peaks. Researchers have connected the periodic formation of supercontinents in Earth’s geological past to the nourishment of tiny, oxygen-producing sea creatures, and the process continues to this day.

At least seven times, the massive plates that make up Earth’s continents have slammed together–sometimes two at a time, and sometimes all of them–forming what geologists call supercontinents. Those gradual collisions severely warped the intervening crust and pushed up high mountain ranges, such as the Himalayas. Each time, over millions of years, wind and rain wore down those mountains into dust that was flushed into the sea. There, minerals containing iron, phosphorus, and other elements became food for microscopic plant life that flourished and, through photosynthesis, boosted the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere. The result, a team reported on 27 July in Nature Geoscience, was that atmospheric oxygen content rose from what they call negligible levels about 2.65 billion years ago to about 21% today.

Oil painting ‘invented in Asia, not Europe’

Published

asianwindow

on April 23, 2008

in Art and Heritage

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Roger Highfield in The Telegraph, UK:

In 2001 the Taliban destroyed two ancient colossal Buddha statues in the Afghan region of Bamiyan, around 140 miles northwest of Kabul, which were hewn out of sandstone cliffs in the sixth century and, measuring up to 55 metres, were the biggest of their kind.

Although caves decorated with precious murals from 5th to 9th century A.D. also suffered from Taliban attacks on this World Heritage Site, they have since become the focus of a major discovery, revealing Buddhist oil paintings that predate those in Renaissance Europe by hundreds of years.

Where billions vanish

Published

asianwindow

on April 11, 2008

in Pakistan

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Pervez Hoodbhoy, chairman of the physics department at Quaid-i-Azam University, in Dawn:

Gen. (retd) Pervez Musharraf, aided by his trusted lieutenant and chairman of the Higher Education Commission, Dr Atta-ur-Rahman, lays claim to a ‘revolutionary programme’ that has reversed the decades-old decline of Pakistan’s universities.

The higher education budget shot up from Rs3.9bn in 2001-02 to an astounding Rs33.7bn in 2006-07. But, in fact, much of this has been consumed by futile projects and mega wastage. Fantastically expensive scientific equipment, bought for research, often ends up locked away in campuses.

An example: a Pelletron accelerator worth Rs400m was ordered in 2005 with HEC funds. It eventually landed up at Quaid-i-Azam University, and was installed last month by a team of Americans from the National Electrostatics Corporation that flew in from Wisconsin. But now that it is there and fully operational, nobody – including the current director – has the slightest idea of what research to do with it. Its original proponents are curiously lacking in enthusiasm and are quietly seeking to distance themselves from the project.

India-Pakistan nuclear war would cause worldwide destruction

Published

asianwindow

on April 9, 2008

in Conflict

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From NewScientist:

Apart from the human devastation, a small-scale nuclear war between India and Pakistan would destroy much of the ozone layer, leaving the DNA of humans and other organisms at risk of damage from the Sun’s rays, say researchers.

Michael Mills of the University of Colorado at Boulder, US, and colleagues used computer models to study how 100 Hiroshima-sized bombs would affect the atmosphere.

They say that their scenario – in which each country launches 50 devices of 15 kilotons – is realistic, given the countries’ nuclear arsenals.

[Photo: A nuclear bomb is detonated in a test blast at Mururoa atoll, French Polynesia, in 1971./AP]

University of Colorado at Boulder:

Sir Arthur C. Clarke: 90th birthday reflections

Published

asianwindow

on March 20, 2008

in Obituaries

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Hello! This is Arthur Clarke, speaking to you from my home in Colombo, Sri Lanka.

As I approach my 90th birthday, my friends are asking how it feels like, to have completed 90 orbits around the Sun.

Well, I actually don’t feel a day older than 89!

…Watch the video:

Sundown With Arthur

Jeff Greenwald in Wired:

When last I saw Arthur C. Clarke, in March of 2005, his memory was already fading.

It was late afternoon. We sat on the patio of the Galle Face Hotel, one of Arthur’s favorite spots in Colombo, Sri Lanka. It had been nine years since my last visit to his adopted island. Now I was back working with Mercy Corps, an international aid agency, on a tsunami relief project. Clarke sipped his tea and stared west, where the Indian Ocean stretched in an uninhibited arc to the coast of Somalia.

“I don’t remember anything about working with Stanley (Kubrick) on 2001,” he said, “or my months at the Chelsea Hotel. I don’t remember my last scuba dive, or what my mother’s face looked like. The only thing I remember with any real clarity is the first kiss with the love of my life — and our last words, before we parted.”

[Photo: Clarke stands by his private satellite dish, one of the first private dishes in Asia, on the deck of his Sri Lanka home.]

For Clarke, issues of faith, but tackled scientifically

From the New York Times:

“Absolutely no religious rites of any kind, relating to any religious faith, should be associated with my funeral” were the instructions left by Arthur C. Clarke, who died on Wednesday at the age of 90. This may not have surprised anyone who knew that this science-fiction writer, fabulist, fantasist and deep-sea diver had long seen religion as a symptom of humanity’s “infancy,” something to be outgrown and overcome.

But his fervor is still jarring because when it comes to the scriptural texts of modern science fiction, and the astonishing generation of prophetic innovators who were his contemporaries – Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein and Ray Bradbury – Mr. Clarke’s writings were the most biblical, the most prepared to amplify reason with mystical conviction, the most religious in the largest sense of religion: speculating about beginnings and endings, and how we get from one to the other.

[Photo: Keir Dullea in the film version of Arthur C. Clarke’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.”]

Previously on Asian Window:

Foreign couples turn to India for surrogate mothers

Published

asianwindow

on March 6, 2008

in Health and Society

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Reproductive outsourcing is a new but rapidly expanding enterprise in India. Amelia Gentleman reports from Mumbai in International Herald tribune:

Yonatan Gher and his male partner plan eventually to tell their child that it was made in India, in the womb of a woman they never met, with the egg of a Mumbai housewife they picked out from an Internet line-up of candidates.

The embryo was formed in January in an Indian fertility clinic about 4,000 kilometers, or 2,500 miles, from Gher’s home in Tel Aviv, nurtured by a team of doctors who have begun specializing in surrogacy services for couples from around the world.

As they waited to see if the fertilization process had been successful, Gher, 29, and his partner sped around the streets of Mumbai in the back of an autorickshaw, drinking in scenes of a country they had never previously visited, staring at the unfamiliar faces of Indian women and children and “trying to imagine our child,” he said.

(Photo: Surrogate mothers at the Kaival Hospital at Anand, in the western Indian state of Gujarat in February 2006. AP)

IHT also has photos and audio of an Israeli man searching for a surrogate mother

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