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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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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