Santhosh’s Blog

Phew! One of the coolest news I’ve ever read!

I found this news from VOA News. And here’s an excerpt:

India is getting into the business of launching satellites, giving rise to a new space race. The country’s space program recently put 10 small satellites in orbit, all in one go, an achievement topped only by Russia. The launch signaled India’s desire to capture a larger share of the global commercial satellite launch market – a $90-billion-a-year industry that, so far, has been dominated by the U.S. and Russia. Raymond Thibodeaux reports from Bangalore, India’s space agency headquarters.

Read on…

Now, this is a new rocket launching business for Indian Govt

No, its not a joke. Its a program called “Name in Space”. Your name will be stored on DVD and will be sent along with the Kepler to the space!

Kepler mission is NASA’s first mission to find the planets that are Earth-Sized. And also it orbits around other stars in our galaxy.

Or you can read the excerpt from the official site:

Kepler is NASA’s first mission capable of detecting Earth-size and smaller planets in the habitable zone of solar-like stars. The spacecraft is planned to be launched from Kennedy Space Center in February 2009. The spacecraft will be launched into orbit around the Sun, not the Earth, with an orbital period of 372 days. The spacecraft will slowly drift away from the Earth, such that in about 25 years it will be half an Earth orbit away, 300 million kilometers distant from the Earth, passing behind the Sun as viewed from Earth.

This mission is an attempt to find life on some planet, just like the UFOs visiting us, now we are visiting them :p

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ISRO Stands for Indian Space Research Organization. Recently the PSLV franchisee has made an break-through by docking 10 satellites to orbit in a single mission/launch.

This is the first time in the world that 10 satellites were launched into orbit in a single launch and this is also PSLV’s 12th successful flight. Earlier, Russia had launched eight satellites together.

The satellite weighed 230 tonnes and carried heaviest 824 KG luggage.

More info @ The Statesman

NASA HiRISE camera, onboard Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, was looking for frost when it snapped a first-time ever photograph of active avalanches near the north pole of the planet Mars. 

Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Candice Hansen, deputy principal investigator for the HiRISE mission stated, “We were checking for springtime changes in the carbon-dioxide frost covering a northern dune field, and finding the avalanches was completely serendipitous.” [NASA: "Avalanches on Mars"]

The images of active avalanches at the Martian north pole are the first ever taken by scientists. Released on March 3, 2008, they were taken by the camera High Resolution Imaging Experiment (HiRISE), which is orbiting Mars onboard the NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

An image of the avalanche is found on the NASA website “Avalanches on Mars.”

Please take a look at the “full-sized version” of the image in order to see the active avalanche under much more details.

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 REDMOND, Wash.–When Microsoft releases its WorldWide Telescope this spring, the program will be a Windows-only download.

Much of the astronomical community, however, uses Macs and other Unix-based hardware. So, when principal developer Jonathan Fay shows off the program, he often uses a MacBook Pro. The telescope program itself, though, is running in Windows using the Mac’s dual-boot Boot Camp software.

Other Mac users will have to use similar technology. The program can theoretically run using virtualization programs, such as VMware’s Fusion or Parallels, but 3D applications often throw those programs for a loop.

Principal researcher Curtis Wong used a WinTel laptop running Vista on Monday night to demonstrate the program to journalists at a reception kicking off TechFest, Microsoft’s internal science fair. Microsoft first demoed an early version of the software at last year’s TechFest, while its current incarnation was shown last week at the TED conference in Monterey, Calif.

Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope software offers several different ways to look at the heavens, including the Hydrogen Alpha view.
(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET News.com)

Given his penchant for Cupertino-designed hardware, I wondered why Fay was less than enthusiastic about prospects for a native Mac version. He said the type of programming needed to make the software a reality can be done vastly faster using Microsoft’s .Net and C# programming tools.

To make it truly cross-platform, he said, “I’d basically be looking at three to four years of development.” Plus, he quipped, “It doesn’t hurt if a few people buy Windows.”

Although Wong and Fay have done the actual software development largely over the last 18 months, the genesis of the project goes back to conversations Wong had years ago with now-missing Microsoft researcher Jim Gray, to whom Wong paid tribute.

“It’s dedicated to Jim,” he said, noting that Microsoft is making the software available free via a not-for-profit Web site.

Wong demonstrated a number of different ways to view the universe, including X-ray, hydrogen alpha and traditional imaging. The different views offer starkly different looks at the universe.

The images, as previously noted, are stitched together from a variety of sources including the Hubble and other Earth and space-based telescopes. Think of it as a “terapixel panorama,” Fay and Wong said of the finished product.

Contrary to some reports, however, the program does not use Microsoft’s PhotoSynth technology, but rather a different stitching technology and an internally developed projection method known as Toast.

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