India’s first ambitious lunar mission Chandrayaan-1 lost its contact with ISRO on Saturday August 29, 2009 after ten months of its launch. According to ISRO officials this mission is over now, and it has completed 90-95% of the technical work, it was intended to do.
Chandrayaan - 1
Chandrayaan 1: Launch and Achievements
Chandrayaan 1 was launched on October 22, 2008 from Satish Dhawan Space Centre at Sriharikota by PSLV-C11. It completed 312 days in orbit and making 3400 orbits around the moon. It was equipped with sophisticated sensors such as terrain mapping camera, hyper-spectral imager and moon mineralogy mapper, meeting most of the scientific objectives of the mission.
Chandrayaan 1 sent nearly 70,000 amazing images of surface of moon which includes mountains and craters especially at moon’s polar region. It also collected critical information about chemical and mineral content of moon.
Madhavan Nair, the ISRO chief admitted that Mission Chandrayaan has come to an end, although it is a difficult situation.
He says:
“At the moment, we have suspended the mission. Calling it off would depend on what has failed. We are trying to analyze what has gone wrong and we will take a look at it tomorrow.”
Problems with Chandrayaan 1:
Scientists are still analyzing the reasons of this unexpected problem that came with Chandrayaan, but it may be caused due to the malfunctioning of star sensor that determines the orientation of spacecraft. This sensor started created problems four month back before this mission ended. Also one of the bus management units failed. There was also an overheating problem necessitating the deactivation of some of the 11 payloads.
Black Holes have always fascinated scientist due to their mysterious properties, but there is much to be learned about them. These strange regions once thought to be absent of light before research found that actually these are the regions with such an extreme gravitational force that nothing, not even light can escape from their surface.
Black Holes
According to a latest invention Black Holes (imitation of Black Hole actually) can be reproduce in laboratory now!
Black Holes: What are they?
Let’s understand it through the example of our own earth:
The mass of earth creates the gravity the pulls the things towards it. With enough power we can escape the earth’s gravitational force. This is how space vehicles leave the earth’s atmosphere.
Now if we squeeze the size of earth to that of a marble. This will increase the mass and gravitational force of earth to such extent that it would be impossible to bypass that force. Black holes are also regions with such a large mass and gravitational force that not even light can escape from them. Due to this it is not possible to view Black holes, but their presence can be realized only by the nearby activities.
Till now scientist have done extensive research about these strange regions in the universe. We know how they born, where they occur, and why they exists in different sizes, but there is much to know about them.
How to Know More about Black Holes?:
Dartmouth researchers have now proposed a new way to explore Black Holes. They plan to reproduce the black hole at a smaller scale in laboratory. A paper has been published in this regard in Physical Review Letters, August 20 issue.
This method of creating tiny black holes of quantum size will help scientist to understand the insights of Black holes. Stephen Hawking, eminent space scientist had proposed that, Black Holes are not totally void of activity and they emit radiations in the form of photon. This radiation is known as Hawking Radiation or Bekenstein-Hawking radiation.
According to Paul Nation, a co-author of paper and Dartmouth graduate student,
“Hawking famously showed that black holes radiate energy according to a thermal spectrum. His calculations relied on assumptions about the physics of ultra-high energies and quantum gravity. Because we can’t yet take measurements from real black holes, we need a way to recreate this phenomenon in the lab in order to study it, to validate it.”
Scientist has shown that how a magnetic field-pulse microwave transmission line containing an array of superconducting quantum interference devices can reproduce physics analogous to a radiating black hole. This system can be controlled in laboratory and quantum mechanics properties. They can also manipulate the strength of applied magnetic field.
Past Attempts in this Field:
Creation of Black Holes in Laboratory has been proposed before by scientists. It has been proposed using supersonic fluid flows, ultracold bose-einstein condensates and nonlinear fiber optic cables. But the main problem in these schemes was weak Hawking radiation or masked radiation due to overheating of device. This latest scheme is much more efficient than previous proposed models.
Authors of Paper:
This paper has been written by Paul Nation, Alexander Rimberg, Eyal Buks and Miles Blencowe.
Scientist has reported that glaciers at Antarctica a melting at an alarming rates. It has been observed that “Pine Island”, a gigantic glacier in West Antarctica is melting at four times higher rate that it was 10 years ago. This glacier is around twice the size of Scotland.
Glaciers at Antarctica Region
According to a recent research, published in “Geophysical Research Letters” journal, it has been estimated that at this rate the main section of glaciers will disappear in 100 years. This is six time sooner than it was estimated previously.
This research was led by Professor Duncan Wingham at University College London, and was funded by the UK Natural Environment Research Council.
Pine Island:
Pine Island is one of the main glacier that is located the most inaccessible region of Antarctic. It is nearly 1000 km from the research base. This island was unnoticed for many years, but now scientists have tracked the development of glacier in past 15 years using satellite measurements.
According to Professor Andrew Shepherd of School of Earth and Environment at Leeds University, this accelerated thinning of Pine Island shows the increasing imbalance in Cyrosphere. It may remain unobserved in absence of satellite instruments. He is a co-author of research paper.
Scientist has collected a record of past 15 years, which helped them to identify the subtle and dramatic change that was hidden previously.
Role of Global Warming:
Scientist says that the retreat of glaciers in this region of Antarctica is caused by warming of surrounding oceans, but it’s too early to relate this to global warming. Some experts say that warming of Antarctic sea is a major reason to this.
Impact on Environment:
The area of Pine Island is around 5,400 km square is big enough to increase the rate at which sea level is rising around the world.
Professor Shepherd says:
“Because the Pine Island Glacier contains enough ice to almost double the IPCC’s best estimate of 21st century sea level rise, the manner in which the glacier will respond to the accelerated thinning is a matter of great concern.”
Scientist has discovered more than 350 new species in eastern Himalayas. These species includes world’s smallest deer, a flying frog and a 100 million old gecko. But the existence of these species is now threatened due to the climate change.
Scientist after researching for more than 10 years in remote areas of eastern mountains has found these amazing discoveries. These areas are endangered by global warming effects.
Some of the Amazing Creatures:
Some of the cool creatures like bright green frog that uses its red and long webbed feet to glide in air are now at the edge of extinction due to the changing temperature of that area.
The Flying Frog
They have also found “leaf deer,” which is the world’s oldest and smallest deer species with 60-80 centimeters in height. Initially it was believed that it was juvenile of another species, but DNA tests confirmed that it is a new species.
The Leef Deer
A new species of Caecilian, a limbless amphibian has also been found that resembles giant earthworm and lives underground.
One of the most important finding of this research is a 100-million old gecko which is the oldest fossil gecko species ever discovered in history.
There are 244 plants, 16 amphibians, 16 reptiles, 14 fish, 2 birds, 2 mammals and at least 60 new invertebrates have been discovered. These all discoveries have been compiled in WWF report which is a collection of all these discoveries from leading scientist from different organizations.
“The Eastern Himalayas — Where Worlds Collide”
“The Eastern Himalayas — Where Worlds Collide,” is the WWF report which covers all details of discoveries made by scientist during the period of 1998 to 2008.
The region of this all research was from Bhutan and North-East India to far north of Myanmar as well as Nepal and southern parts of Tibet Autonomous Region (China) so it spanned five countries Nepal, China, India, Bhutan and Myanmar.
According to Jon Miceler, Director of WWF’s Eastern Himalayans Program:
“The good news of this explosion in species discoveries is tempered by the increasing threats to the Himalayas’ cultural and biological diversity. This rugged and remarkable landscape is already seeing direct, measurable impacts from climate change and risks being lost forever.”
The Eastern Himalaya:
The Eastern Himalayan region is house of 10,000 plant species, 300 mammal species, 977 bird species, 176 reptiles, 105 amphibians and 269 types of freshwater fish.
This region has highest density of Bengal Tigers in world and one-horned Rhino is found only here. Some other endangered species of this region are Asian Elephants, Red Pandas, Golden Langurs, Gangetic Dolphins etc.
A large region of Eastern Himalayan is still unexplored and poorly surveyed due to extremely difficult biological nature of this area.
Software development is undoubtedly a complex and laborious process. Software engineers really work hard to carry out a particular software. But now a European experiment is going on which will automate the building and testing phase of programming, thus reducing the time and efforts used in this process.
Software Development
First Ever Computer Program:
Computer programming has came a long way since days when Ada Lovelace wrote the first ever computer program in 1842. It was a small program written to calculate Bernoulli numbers. These days programming was not as complex and was not more than an individual effort.
Present day Scenario:
These days’ computer programs are getting more and more complex. A team of software developers works for years to develop a program, building the concept, coding, testing, debugging and then finally releasing and maintenance of programs.
Now if we need to reduce the time and effort in software development process, the only thing we can do is to “Automate the Process.”
The ETICS project:
ETICS project is a giant leap in the field of software development. It will automate the most of the software programming tasks thus helping software developers, managers and testers and will also help to obtain high quality. This will also help in reducing the cost of software and time taken in development.
The new system:
This new system will help software developers and users to automate the most of the process in development and testing execution. This amazing platform will use latest in “Grid” software and it can operate in multiple platforms. It can also be customized and developed further as it is an open source project.
Developers can install the client interface of system and then they can use results from round-the-clock builds. Tests can also be monitored via web and configuration metadata of software can also be browed and edited via a secure web application.
Mr. Alberto Di Meglio: Man behind this project
Mr. Alberto Di Meglio of CERN, the European organization for nuclear research is leading the research. In his words:
“By automating many of their day-to-day tasks, the ETICS system supports software managers, developers and testers in obtaining higher quality software.”
Development:
The ETICS platform has been developed in two phases over 3 years and has been continuously refined in collaboration with users. Some more new functions are being developed for ETICS 2 which will help software developers to run complex tests over distributed networks.
We must hope that this new system will surely bring a new revolution in the field of software development and testing.
