Hardik – India’s First Space Tourist
Bingo Bindass’ is finally going to space. Hardik Gajjar, a science undergraduate from Ahmedabad, has won UTV’s ‘Bingo Bindass Go to Space Contest’ to become the country’s first space tourist.
UTV, which launched its entertainment channel called Brand Bindass last August, started the contest to find India’s first space tourist. After a seven-city hunt and ground auditions, it zeroed in on Ahmedabad-based Hardik.
‘Honestly speaking, I was attracted by the prizes of watches and iPods! I thought, if not the space ticket, I’ll at least win an iPod,’ said Hardik.
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NASA probe to fly past little, sun-baked Mercury
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A NASA probe next week will become the first spacecraft in 33 years to fly by Mercury, a sojourn scientists hope will unlock the secrets of the small sun-baked planet.
NASA’s car-sized MESSENGER spacecraft is scheduled to zip about 124 miles above the cratered, rocky surface of the closest planet to the sun on Monday, part of a mission designed to place it into orbit around Mercury in 2011.
“I think we’re in for some big surprises,” Faith Vilas, one of the scientists involved in the mission, told reporters during a conference call on Thursday.
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Hubble Telescope upgrade on hold
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) – A long-delayed and nearly canceled upgrade to the Hubble Space Telescope will have to wait until NASA completes delivery of three modules to the International Space Station, officials said on Tuesday.
The delay of shuttle Atlantis’ mission to the space station, caused by fuel sensor failures in December, means Atlantis likely will not be ready for the Hubble mission planned for August. NASA has two other higher-priority flights for its space shuttles as well.
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Scientists find hot spot on Saturn’s chilly pole
LONDON (Reuters) – Saturn’s chilly north pole boasts a hot spot of compressed air, a surprising discovery that could shed light on other planets within our own solar system and beyond, researchers said on Thursday.
Scientists already knew about a hot spot at Saturn’s sunny south pole but data from the Cassini spacecraft now shows that the winter pole drenched in darkness also has a hot spot, said Nick Teanby, a planetary scientist, who worked on the study.
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Scientists discover new planet outside solar system
Scientists in Germany have discovered what is believed to be the youngest planet outside the solar system, the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics announced on Wednesday.
The giant young planet, called TW Hydrae b, “is still linked to the dusty disk surrounding its parent star”, the institute said ahead of publication of the discovery in the British science journal Nature.
The planet has a mass ten times greater than that of Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system, and orbits its mother star every 3.65 days at a distance of 6 million kilometres.
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ISRO saw string of successes
In the year gone by, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) achieved self-reliance in launch vehicle technology with the successful ground testing of the Cryogenic Upper Stage, a key component in putting heavier payloads in orbit.
Capping a string of successes in 2007 in space research, India is poised to take a giant leap forward in the new year with the launch of its maiden moon mission Chandrayaan-I, a feat achieved by a few nations.
2008 will also see India taking first steps towards putting a man in space.
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Deep Impact Spacecraft Zips Past Earth
A comet-busting NASA spacecraft zipped past Earth on Monday on its way to rendezvous with another comet in an extended mission that will also see it hunt for Earth-sized planets around a cluster of stars. The Deep Impact probe made the first of three flybys designed to use the planet’s gravity to hurtle the spacecraft toward comet Hartley 2 for a 2010 meeting.
At its closest, the spacecraft was 10,000 miles above Australia.
“We’re taking laps around the sun until the comet comes,” said William Blume of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
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NASA Offers Airline Safety Data
WASHINGTON — NASA on Monday released an intentionally scrambled, partly deleted version of the safety data it gathered from 24,000 interviews with airline pilots, making good on a promise to Congress to make public information that it said earlier this year would shake public confidence in the airlines and threaten their commercial interest.
But the agency released the data from the $11.5 million program in a format that made it difficult if not impossible for outsiders to analyze in search of trends, presenting the reports as documents rather than spreadsheets. And the NASA administrator, Michael Griffin, said his agency had no plans to do additional work with the material, which he sought to disown in a conference call with reporters.
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NASA’s new probe to search for ice on Mars in May 2008
NASA’s new probe named Phoenix is all set to touch down on the unexplored north pole of Mars on May 25, 2008, in an attempt to find whether water exists on the Red Planet even today.
Launched in August 2007, Phoenix will land on Mars next year to scratch through the ground cover at the north pole and find what may be a thick layer of water ice beneath the frozen surface.
According to a report in Discovery News, the landing spot of the probe has been carefully selected and timed to coincide with the seasonal spring thaw.
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Shuttle repair to delay European space lab launch
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) – Repairing an electrical connection in a U.S. space shuttle’s fuel tank will push the already delayed launch of Europe’s first permanent space laboratory beyond the current target date of January 10, NASA said on Thursday.
Two attempts this month to launch the shuttle Atlantis carrying the European lab to the International Space Station were canceled due to malfunctioning fuel sensors that are part of an emergency engine cutoff system.
NASA had rescheduled the flight for no earlier than January 10, but the repair plan under consideration will bump the launch by a few days to a few weeks, shuttle program manager Wayne Hale told reporters in a conference call.
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