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.
