Science and technology news blog

Today, the scientists at the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) reported the successful launch of India’s latest communications satellite, Insat-4CR.

“The launch is crucial to the extent that the high-powered satellite will augment the country’s communication capacity and help meet increasing demand,” said the spokesman for Bangalore-based Indian Space Research Organisation.

Soon after the successful launch, the India’s Prime Minister and the Vice President congratulated the Indian space scientists and technologists involved in the successful launch of a rocket that put the country’s latest communications satellite into orbit.

In a message sent to ISRO Vice President Mohammad Hamid Asari noted that the successful launch further validated the immense economic and strategic importance of the country’s space programme.

Scientists claim that it is possible to glimpse the universe before the Big Bang. Here is an excerpt from USA Today:

This just in from Canada.com

An experimental jet engine has been successfully tested at speeds of up to 11,000 km/h, or 10 times the speed of sound, during trials in Australia’s outback, defence scientists said on Friday. The experimental scramjet engine is an air-breathing supersonic combustion engine being developed by Australian and U.S. defence scientists that researchers hope will lead to super-high speed flight.

Zooming through low-Earth orbit at 17,500 mph, Suni Williams completes the standard marathon distance every 5.4 seconds. Good thing Rosie Ruiz never thought of that.Williams is registered for next month’s Boston Marathon, even though she’ll be stuck on the international space station when the rest of the field lines up for the 111th edition of the race. So the U.S. Navy commander will run the equivalent distance on a treadmill – 210 miles above Earth, and tethered to her track by bungee cords so she doesn’t float away.

Not since Ruiz hopped the ‘T’ to the finish line to accept the winner’s wreath in 1980 has a Boston Marathon competitor relied so heavily on public transportation.

“She thought it would be cool if she gave it a try,” said Williams’ sister, Dina Pandya, who will run the race the traditional way. “She said, ‘I’ll call you on Heartbreak Hill.’”

Another NASA astronaut, Karen Nyberg, will dodge the potholes from Hopkinton to Boston’s Back Bay on April 16 along with Pandya and almost 24,000 other runners. Although the race starts at 10 a.m. EDT on Earth, Williams might not be able to run contemporaneously because her sleep schedule – a fairly arbitrary matter in space – is set for the arrival of a Soyuz mission.

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Sunlight can cause asteroids to spin more quickly, scientists say, showing just how dynamic our solar system can be.

International teams of scientists studying two asteroids, one about 1.5 kilometres wide and the other about 114 metres wide, confirm a previously unproven theory that sunlight can affect asteroid rotation.

Dr Stephen Lowry of Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland says the findings boost the understanding of the physical properties and dynamics of asteroids, hunks of metal and rock rattling around in space.

“This is important as asteroids are leftovers from the formation of the solar system, along with comets, and so by studying them we gain insights into what the solar system was like some 4.5 billion years ago,” he says.

In research appearing in the journals Nature and Science, the scientists focused on the so-called YORP effect, named after four scientists (Yarkovsky-O’Keefe-Radzievskii-Paddack) who inspired the theory.

The idea is the Sun’s heat serves as a propulsion engine on the irregular features of an asteroid’s surface.

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NASA scientists were able to analyze the makeup of distant planets in other solar systems using a technique that could one day be used to find life on other planets, astronomers said Wednesday.

Teams of scientists used the space-based Spitzer infrared telescope to measure the spectra, or light emissions, of two giant, gaseous planets, trillions of kilometres away from Earth. By breaking the light given off by the planets into different wavelengths, the scientists could analyze their chemical composition.

The two planets – known as HD 189733b, 63 light years away in the constellation Vulpecula, and HD 209458b, 154 light years away in the constellation Pegasus – are so-called hot-Jupiters, gaseous planets like Jupiter, but located much closer to their suns.

At a teleconference, scientists involved in the project said that more powerful telescopes could likely use the same technique to examine smaller, rocky planets, which could be more Earth-like.

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Scientists have long debated whether water flowed on the red planet, with evidence increasing in recent years. The presence of water would raise the possibility of at least primitive life forms existing there.

Images from a camera aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter show alternating layers of dark- and light-toned rock in a giant rift valley.

Within those deposits are a series of linear fractures, called joints, that are surrounded by “halos” of light-toned bedrock, according to researchers from the University of Arizona.

Their findings, published in Thursday’s edition of the journal Science, were being presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco.

Lead author Chris H. Okubo said the “halos” indicate areas where fluids, probably water, passed through the bedrock. Minerals in the fluid strengthen and bleach the rock, he said, making it more resistant to erosion than other areas.

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Scientists have long debated whether water flowed on the red planet, with evidence increasing in recent years. The presence of water would raise the possibility of at least primitive life forms existing there.

Images from a camera aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter show alternating layers of dark- and light-toned rock in a giant rift valley.

Within those deposits are a series of linear fractures, called joints, that are surrounded by “halos” of light-toned bedrock, according to researchers from the University of Arizona.

Their findings, published in Thursday’s edition of the journal Science, were being presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco.

Lead author Chris H. Okubo said the “halos” indicate areas where fluids, probably water, passed through the bedrock. Minerals in the fluid strengthen and bleach the rock, he said, making it more resistant to erosion than other areas.

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Saturn’s largest moon Titan is really living up to its name.

An image released today shows a huge swirling cloud roughly half the size of the United States over the moon’s north pole. The formation—which is made up of ethane, methane, and other organic material—could be the source of methane lakes spotted near the pole last summer.

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft captured the image of the 1,490-mile-diameter (2,400-kilometer-diameter) cloud on December 29, 2006. The cloud’s presence fits predictions that Titan has a “methane cycle” similar to Earth’s water cycle, with bodies of liquid methane evaporating and forming clouds that rain material back down on the surface.

“We knew this cloud had to be there but were amazed at its size and structure,” Christophe Sotin of the University of Nantes in France and a member of the Cassini imaging team, said in a NASA release.

The cloud system will shift position with the moon’s seasons, experts predict, and it will eventually migrate from the north pole to the south pole.

Ground-based observations suggest that total cloud activity on Titan lasts for about 25 years, then vanishes for a 4- to 5-year period. The massive cloud over the pole should be around for several more years before it disintegrates.

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A unmanned Sea Launch Zenit 3SL rocket which was supposed to carry a satellite to an orbit around Earth, has exploded on its Ocean Odyssey launch pad, just seconds before it was scheduled to launch. The engine had just been started when the rocket appeared to fall downwards, and was engulfed in a fireball. The rocket’s payload, the NSS-8 communications satellite, for SES New Skies, is believed to have been destroyed in the incident.

Sea Launch has confirmed that all launch personnel are safe. During launch operations, they routinely are aboard another ship, the Sea Launch Commander, located approximatly three miles away. The extent of damage to the Odyssey platform is unclear at this stage.

This is the ninth launch failure of the Zenit rocket, and the third for a 3SL varient, operated by Sea Launch.

Rather than having had its air knocked out into space, Mars might just be holding its breath.

New findings suggests the missing atmosphere of Mars might be locked up in hidden reservoirs on the planet, rather than having been chafed away by billions of years’ worth of solar winds as previously thought.

Combining two years of observations by the European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft, researchers determined that Mars is currently losing only about 20 grams of air per second into space.

Extrapolating this measurement back over 3.5 billion years, they estimate that only a small fraction, 0.2 to 4 millibars, of carbon dioxide and a few centimeters of water could have been lost to solar winds during that timeframe. (A bar is a unit for measuring pressure; Earth’s atmospheric pressure is about 1 bar.)

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India has for the first time successfully brought a space capsule back to earth. Until now, only the United States, Russia and China had similar expertise in re entry technology. The success also takes the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) a step closer to its goal of putting an Indian in space some years from now.

On Monday, ISRO officials said the 550-kg recoverable space capsule—called Space capsule Recovery Experiment (SRE-1)—that was launched on January 10 had returned to the earth’s atmosphere, splashing down in the Bay of Bengal, about 140 km east of the Sriharikota coast at 9.46 a.m., exactly as planned.

It demonstrated ISRO’s ability to build a capsule that could endure temperatures of more than 1,200 degrees Celsius while re-entering the earth’s atmosphere after a space expedition.

Retrieved by a Coast Guard team, SRE-1 will be taken to the Sriharikota Range by road on Tuesday for ISRO scientists to take a close look at the heat-resistant tiles that protected it during the re-entry phase.

ISRO chairman G. Madhavan Nair said, “SRE-I is an important beginning for providing a low-cost platform for micro-gravity experiments in space science and technology and the return of specimen from space.” Dr S.C. Chakravarthy, programme director (space science), ISRO, who monitored the touchdown from ISTRAC (ISRO’s Telemetry, Tracking & Command Network) station on the outskirts of Bangalore, said, “We are very happy with the outcome of this experiment because it will lead to new things—certainly to a manned mission into space.”

Nothing can keep dedicated stargazers from trying to get a glimpse of the brightest comet seen in decades _ not even temperatures as low as 40 below zero.

There hadn’t been a lot of buzz about Comet McNaught, discovered just last year. But as the comet got closer to the sun, it brightened and the word spread _ the comet was special.

Martin Gutoski drove to a lookout about five miles north of Fairbanks on Tuesday evening, when skies were especially cold and clear _ good comet-viewing weather, even if it was frigid.

The amateur astronomer waited for sunset and watched as the sky turned salmon red and darkened. He turned his attention toward the spot on the horizon where the sun set.

“It is a very large spike, almost a vertical spike at sunset. ... I was more than impressed with it,” he said.

Comet McNaught, discovered last year by Australian astronomer R.H. McNaught, is expected to remain visible throughout the Northern Hemisphere through Friday, when it will come to within 16 million miles of the sun and be obscured by the sun’s glare. After that, it will eventually emerge for people in the Southern Hemisphere to enjoy.

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An Indian rocket successfully orbited a cache of four satellites Wednesday in the first space launch of the year.

Liftoff of the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) was at 0353 GMT (10:53 p.m. EST Tuesday) from the Satish Dhawan Space Center on India’s east coast [image]. The four-stage rocket and its payloads arrived in orbit about 16 minutes after launch, and deployment of the satellites was completed about four minutes later.

The booster was shooting for a Sun-synchronous orbit about 395 miles (635 kilometers) high, according to the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO).

The 145-foot (44-meter) tall rocket was the first PSLV to use a dual payload adapter to launch two primary payloads on the same mission. The Cartosat 2 Earth-observation satellite rode atop the apparatus, while a recoverable capsule was housed below [image].

Cartosat 2 joins six other spacecraft currently operating in India’s remote sensing satellite fleet, and is the 12th member of the program throughout its history. The 1,500-pound (680-kilogram) craft is a direct follow-on to the larger Cartosat 1 satellite, which was launched in 2005.

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Astronomers have mapped the positions of vast, invisible isles of dark matter in the sky, within which normal “bright” matter galaxies are embedded like glittering gems. The three-dimensional map [image] spans not only space, but also time, and stretches back to when the universe was only about half its present age.

Dark matter is a mysterious hypothetical substance [image] that is thought not to interact with light photons and is thus invisible to current detection instruments.

Scientists first invoked the concept in the 1930s to explain why fast-spinning galaxies with relatively little mass don’t break apart. The unusual solution: They contain a large amount of invisible matter whose heft and gravity hold the galaxies together. Scientists have since estimated that only about one-sixth of the matter in the universe is visible, and that the rest is dark matter.

Some of the strongest evidence for dark matter’s existence was announced last year, and even that was highly debated.

Even though dark matter can’t be seen directly, some scientists say its presence and distribution in the universe can be observed indirectly by the way its gravity distorts the light of distant galaxies streaming toward us.

“We look at galaxies which are behind the dark matter that we’re interested in,” explained study team member Richard Massey of Caltech. “The light from these distant galaxies doesn’t travel in a straight line because space itself is distorted and bent, and the light follows that distortion.”

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