India tests new scramjet rocket engine

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has successfully tested its new scramjet engine and expects a commercial launch. This is being touted as the most cost-effective rocket engine the world has seen.

With this, the ISRO, which is already the most inexpensive commercial satellite launch service provider in the world, expects to attract more customers worldwide.
The test carried out from Satish Dhawan Space Center, located at Sriharikota in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, demonstrated the key technological aspects of the engine.

These included the ignition of its engines at supersonic speeds, maintaining thrust at supersonic speeds, and tests of its air intake mechanism and fuel injection systems.
"The first experimental mission of ISRO's Scramjet Engine towards the realization of an Air Breathing Propulsion System was conducted August 28, 2016 from Satish Dhawan Space Center SHAR, Sriharikota.

After a flight of about 300 seconds, the vehicle touched down in the Bay of Bengal, approximately 320 km from Sriharikota. The vehicle was successfully tracked during its flight from the ground stations at Sriharikota," reads a statement released by ISRO.

The Scramjet engine designed by ISRO uses Hydrogen as a fuel and the Oxygen from the atmospheric air as its oxidizer. The use of atmospheric oxygen will reduce the weight of the rocket engine substantially, which can then be used to launch heavy payloads.

Rocky planet found orbiting habitable zone of nearest star

An international team of astronomers including Carnegie's Paul Butler has found clear evidence of a planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our Solar System. The new world, designated Proxima b, orbits its cool red parent star every 11 days and has a temperature suitable for liquid water to exist on its surface, if it were present.

This rocky world is a little more massive than the Earth and is the closest exoplanet to us; it may even be the closest possible abode for life beyond our own Sun. A paper describing this milestone finding is published by Nature.

Just over four light-years from our Solar System sits a red dwarf star named Proxima Centauri. This cool star in the constellation of Centaurus is too faint to be seen with the naked eye and is close to the much brighter pair of stars known as Alpha Centauri A and B.

During the first half of 2016, the HARPS spectrograph on the European Southern Observatory's 3.6-meter telescope at La Silla regularly observed Proxima Centauri, as did other professional and amateur telescopes around the world.

The team of astronomers, called the Pale Red Dot campaign, led by Carnegie alum Guillem Anglada-Escude of Queen Mary, University of London was looking for a tiny back-and-forth wobble in the star caused by the gravitational pull of an orbiting planet.

In addition to data gathered by the Pale Red Dot campaign, the paper incorporates contributions from scientists who have been observing Proxima Centauri for years, including Butler.

As this was a topic with very wide public interest, the progress of the campaign between mid-January and April 2016 was shared publicly as it occurred on the Pale Red Dot website and via social media. Numerous outreach articles from specialists all around the world accompanied the reports on data collection.

Anglada-Escude explains the background to this unique search: "The first hints of a possible planet were spotted back in 2013, but the detection was not convincing. Since then we have worked hard to get further observations off the ground with help from ESO and others. The recent Pale Red Dot campaign has been about two years in the planning."

The Pale Red Dot data, when combined with earlier observations, revealed a truly exciting result. At regular intervals, Proxima Centauri is approaching Earth at about 5 kilometers per hour - normal human walking pace - and at opposite times in those cycles it is receding at the same speed.

This regular pattern repeats with a period of 11.2 days. Careful analysis of how tiny the resulting Doppler shifts were showed that they indicated the presence of a planet with a mass at least 1.3 times that of the Earth, orbiting about 7 million kilometers from Proxima Centauri - only 5 percent of the distance between the Earth and the Sun.

One complication to the analysis is that red dwarfs like Proxima Centauri are active stars, and their natural brightness variations could mimic the presence of a planet. In order to exclude this possibility, the team also monitored the changing brightness of the star very carefully during the campaign using the ASH2 telescope at the San Pedro de Atacama Celestial Explorations Observatory in Chile and the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network.

Although the planet companion, Proxima b, orbits much closer to its star than Mercury does to the Sun in our Solar System, the star itself is far fainter and cooler than the Sun. As a result, Proxima b has an estimated temperature that - if water were present - would allow it in a liquid state on its surface, thus placing it within the so-called "habitable zone" around the star.

Despite the temperate orbit of Proxima b, the conditions on the surface may be strongly affected by the ultraviolet and x-ray flares from the star - far more intense than the Earth experiences from the Sun.

"The discovery of the potentially habitable planet around Proxima Cen is the culmination of 30 years of work that has improved stellar velocity measurement precision from 300 m/s to 1 m/s," Butler said.

"This work has resulted in the discovery of hundreds of planets around the nearest stars, and now a potentially habitable planet around the nearest star in the sky. This work confirms the Kepler satellite and precision velocity studies that have shown that potentially habitable planets are common, and points the way to the future when such planets will be directly observed with giant ground- and space-based telescopes."

World's Largest Telescope Unlikely to Find Home in India

The telescope is part of an ambitious international project to discover more about our universe.
One of the potential alternate sites for the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), proposed for the Indian town of Hanle, has less advantageous characteristics than other places Indian Minister of State for Science and Technology Y. S. Chowdary said before parliament.
"Hanle site has lower seeing values of 0.9-1.2 arc sec as compared to the alternate sites in Chile and Canary Islands of Spain (La Palma) which have seeing values of 0.55 arc sec.
Thus, scientifically, Hanle has less advantageous characteristics for hosting a mega telescope like the TMT in comparison to the other alternate sites."
Indian participation in the TMT project is being jointly funded and overseen by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE). TMT was originally set to be installed at Mauna Kea in Hawaii, the US.
The construction work for TMT at Mauna Kea was started but had to be stalled due to revocation of a permit by orders of the Supreme Court of Hawaii.

Isaac Asimov's Guide to Earth and Space by Isaac Asimov (Rating *****)

How do we know that stars are millions of miles away? How was the moon formed? Is there life on planets that circle other stars? What is a nova? What are black holes?

You will find the answers in this book, and not in long, mind-numbing technicalities. Isaac Asimov’s unique skill and authority have never been better deployed than in this fantastic grand tour of the cosmos. Over the course of this brilliant expedition, the reader will experience close encounters with giant planets, unusual views of pulsating stars, and rendezvous with distant galaxies, as well as the unfolding history of astronomical discovery, beginning with Eratosthenes (who calculated the size of the Earth in 240 B.C.) and ending with the stunning scientific achievements of the present day. In no other book can the intelligent layman get so keen and thorough a summary of the riddles of Earth and space. Asimov deftly reveals the secrets of the universe with explanations that anyone from novice to scholar can understand and enjoy.

Puzzles by pulsars? Terrified by black holes? Bewildered by the big bang? Here are succinct, crystal-clear answers to more than one hundred of the most significant questions about planets, stars, galaxies, and the essential nature of the universe that have occupied astronomers since the beginning of history. For anyone who has ever looked up at the stars and wondered what it all means, Isaac Asimov’s Guide to Earth and Space is indispensible.

This is a series of 111 short, one- or two-page essays answering simple questions starting with the shape of the Earth and ending with the fate of the Universe. In this it rather resembles the earlier Please Explain. Here, however, since the book was written as a piece and not as a collection, the questions interact and each is related to the questions on either side, so there is a sense of gradually being drawn along. It’s a nice enough book—not world-shaking, but nice.

One of science's most prolific writers produced this question-and-answer book about this planet and astronomy. Although the book is heavy on historical treatment, the science facts are generally up to date. For the novice, the book is best approached in a linear fashion, going through the questions in order, since some answers depend upon previous ones. Other readers may prefer to locate items of interest through the table of contents or the index. The illustrations are disappointing, serving only to accent the page layout. Recommended for general readers at an introductory level; of less value to an academic library.

India launches 20 satellites in single mission

India successfully launched a rocket carrying 20 satellites on Wednesday, setting a new national record as its famously frugal space agency looks to grab a larger slice of the lucrative commercial space market.

The rocket blasted off from the southern spaceport of Sriharikota carrying satellites from the US, Germany, Canada and Indonesia, the most in a single Indian mission.

Most of the satellites are intended to observe and measure the Earth's atmosphere, while another aims to provide services for amateur radio operators.

"Each of these small objects that you are putting into space will carry out their own activity, which is independent of the other, and each of them will live a wonderful life for a finite period," Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) chairman A.S Kiran Kumar told the NDTV news network.

The business of putting commercial satellites into space for a fee is growing as phone, Internet and other companies as well as countries seek greater and more high-tech communications.
India is competing with other international players for a greater share of that launch market, and is known for its low-cost space programme.

Among the 20 satellites launched on Wednesday were 13 from the US including one from a Google-owned company and two from Indian universities.

- 'Market potential' -

Prime Minister Narendra Modi said the launch was a "monumental accomplishment", although it trails Russia's 33 record launched in 2014 and NASA's haul of 29 the year before.

"Our space programme has time and again shown the transformative potential of science & technology in people's lives," Modi tweeted.

Expert Ajay Lele said the latest test was a "quantum jump" for India which has "made its presence felt even more now by displaying its promising market potential".

"India is attracting key foreign players, most importantly the US, in the space market thanks to its cost-effectiveness and credibility," said Lele, a senior fellow at the New Delhi-based Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses.

Lele said he expected ISRO to form a public-private partnership to outsource its growing commercial activity in another three to four years.

Last month India successfully launched its first mini space shuttle as it joined the global race to make reusable rockets.

In 2013 India sent an unmanned rocket to orbit Mars at a cost of just $73 million compared with NASA's Maven Mars mission which had a $671 million price tag.

The successful mission was a source of immense pride in India, which beat rival China in becoming the first Asian country to reach the Red Planet.

Modi has often hailed India's budget space technology, quipping in 2014 that a rocket that launched four foreign satellites into orbit had cost less to make than Hollywood film "Gravity".