Category: Science

On Wednesday evening, India’s moon lander successfully set its four legs softly and safely on the lunar soil as planned, and became the fourth nation in the world to achieve the feat.

They were all men in the Chandrayaan-3 mission and they were confident of soft landing the country's moon lander on the lunar soil, a 'Mission Possible' after the failure of Chandrayaan-2.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday congratulated the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and its team for the successful landing of Chandrayaan-3  on the Moon. 

The Indian space agency is focused on landing its moon lander on Wednesday evening and is not looking at any postponement or Plan B, said a top official about the country’s third moon mission Chandrayaan-3.

Russia's space agency Roscosmos has said that its Luna-25 spacecraft crashed into the moon after it ran into "unspecified trouble", the media reported on Sunday.

India’s moon lander is all set to make a landing on the lunar soil on August 23, 2023 evening as the final deboosting operation got over in the wee hours of Sunday, said Indian

“The Lander Module (LM) health is normal. LM successfully underwent a deboosting operation that reduced its orbit to 113 km x 157 km. The second deboosting operation is scheduled for August 20, 2023, around 0200 Hrs. IST,” ISRO tweeted.

“Orbit circularisation phase commences. Precise maneuvre performed today has achieved a near-circular orbit of 150 km x 177 km. The next operation is planned for August 16, 2023, around 0830 Hrs. IST,” Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) tweeted.

The welding of the main coolant pipeline at the upcoming third 1,000 MW atomic power plant at Tamil Nadu's Kudankulam got completed early this month, Russia’s integrated nuclear power major Rosatom said on Friday.

Luna-25 took off atop a Soyuz-2.1b rocket from the Vostochny launch facility in Russia at 2:10 a.m. Moscow time (4:40 am IST) on Friday, TASS news agency reported.

"Based on the available evidence, the public health risk posed by EG.5 is evaluated as low at the global level," WHO stated, adding that the risk appeared to be comparable to that of other circulating variants of interest.

Chip maker Qualcomm on Wednesday announced that the Snapdragon X75 5G Modem-RF System is continuing to push the boundaries of 5G performance by setting a new world record on sub-6 GHz spectrum, achieving a 7.5 Gbps downlink speed.

Google has announced the launch of 'Project IDX' -- an artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled browser-based development environment for building full-stack web and multiplatform applications.

Is the Indian government looking at having about 130 earth observation satellites under the public-private-partnership model, an idea mooted by the Indian National Space Promotion and Authorisation Centre (IN-SPACe) in its consultation paper?

Three private sector satellite makers are expected to send their earth observation satellites this fiscal, according to the sectoral regulator Indian National Space Promotion and Authorisation Centre (IN-SPACe).

Earth observation satellites are the ones that take pictures of a specified portion of the earth and send it back for infrastructure planning, achieving sustainable goals, e-governance, weather prediction, climate monitoring, disaster preparedness & mitigation and others.

Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) on Tuesday successfully injected the Chandrayaan 3 -- spacecraft to the moon -- into the TransLunar orbit, an official said.

The 44.4 metre tall PSLV Core Alone variant rocket - coded named PSLV-C56 - with a lift off mass of 228.6 ton, blasted off from the first launch pad at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SDSC) here at 6.30 a.m. slowly rose up towards the skies.

Looking back at the year, ISRO had two successful commercial launches. The first one was the launch of 36 satellites belonging to the UK-based OneWeb with the LVM3 rocket in March.

The initial hot test which lasted for 723.6 seconds focused on demonstrating Orbital Module injection and the calibration burn of 100 Newton thrusters and Liquid Apogee Motor (LAM) engines.

On Tuesday, the ISRO said: "The orbit-raising maneuver (Earth-bound perigee firing) is performed successfully from ISTRAC/ISRO, Bengaluru. The spacecraft is expected to attain an orbit of 127609 km x 236 km. The achieved orbit will be confirmed after the observations."

"We are flighting access to Bing Chat in Safari and Chrome to select users as part of our testing on other browsers," Caitlin Roulston, Microsoft's director of communications, said in a statement to The Verge.

According to the space agency, the PSLV rocket with the code PSLV-C56 will carry the Singaporean DS-SAR satellite weighing about 360 kg as the main passenger.

India may be sending spacecraft to orbit the Moon and Mars, and plans to send one to study the Sun and Venus, and finally, humans to space in the last four decades of this century, but its presence in the global space sector market is a mere two-three per cent.

It was on April 19, 1975, that India strode into the 'space age' with the successful launch of 'Aryabhata', the first satellite, named in honour of the ancient mathematician and astronomer Aryabhata.