Tricolour has a date with moon tonight

MUMBAI: If things go as planned, the Indian tricolour will mark its presence on the moon tonight (around 8.30pm IST) after having flown 3,86,000km from the earth. The timing of this proud moment has been specially designed to coincide with Children's Day. ( Watch )

The United States, the former Soviet Union and the European Space Agency comprising 17 countries already have their flags on the moon.

The Indian tricolour is painted on all sides of the 29-kg Moon Impact Probe which is attached to the main orbiting spacecraft, Chandrayaan-1, which was launched on October 22.

The inclusion of the MIP as part of the Chandrayaan mission came at the suggestion of former President A P J Abdul Kalam, a former rocket scientist, during the International Lunar Exploration Working Group conference held at Udaipur in November 2004.

The Indian tricolour has been hoisted on Mount Everest and Antarctica. And now it will be on the moon though it will not be hoisted.

The flight of the MIP on Friday is expected to be a forerunner to the second Indian moon mission, Chandrayaan-2, which will carry a Russian rover and alander slated for lift-off between 2010 and 2012. The crash landing of MIP will help in assessing future soft-landing technologies.

Chandrayaan project director Mylaswamy Annadurai explained to TOI on Friday that at about 8 pm on Friday, a command will be flashed to the MIP from Isro's telemetry, tracking and command network (Istrac) at Bangalore for it to detach from the orbiter. "The MIP will separate and with its three instruments, zoom towards the lunar south pole at a velocity of 1.5km per second," he said.

"At Istrac's mission control room, we will immediately come to know that the MIP has separated from the orbiter. The MIP's flight path will first take it over the Malapert crater for about nine seconds and then crashland near the Shackleton Crater about 25 minutes after its detachment from the orbiter. Malapert Crater is not far from the Shackleton crater," he added.

Annadurai said that after this, the orbiter will fly in the opposite side and thus data will not be immediately available. "The downloading of data from the MIP to the orbiting Chandrayaan and then to the ground station will start once the spacecraft comes over the north pole of the moon. It will take a couple of hours for the data from the MIP to be downloaded and processed," Annadurai said.

He said that once the MIP crashlands on the moon, its own survivability and that of the three instruments will be in question. The probe uses solid propellants. "India's physical presence on the moon with the tricolour will be assured," he said.

Source:
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/

Chandrayaan-I enters lunar orbit

The spacecraft was placed in an elliptical orbit - at 7,500 km aposelene (farthest from moon) and 500 km periselene (nearest to moon) through complex manoeuvres, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) director S. Satish told IANS here.“The liquid apogee motor (LAM) onboard was fired for 805 seconds (13.4 minutes) between 5 p.m. and 5.15 p.m. to put the spacecraft into the elliptical orbit around the moon," Satish told IANS. In this orbit, the spacecraft takes 10 hours to complete one revolution around the moon.

Over the next two-three days, Chandrayaan will be progressively lowered to an orbit that will be 500 km aposelene and 100 km periselene. “The spacecraft will be gently pushed to its designated slot in the lunar orbit and positioned at a distance 100 km from the surface of the moon,” Satish said. The complex manoeuvres were executed by ISRO’s telemetry, tracking and command network (Istrac) on the outskirts of Bangalore and monitored by its deep space network (DSN) at Byalalu, about 40 km from India’s tech hub.“The health of the spacecraft is good and its vital functions are operating normally,” Satish added.

The terrain mapping camera onboard will continue to take pictures of the moon’s surface even as it revolves around its polar orbit. Chandrayaan carries 11 scientific instruments, including six foreign payloads - two from the US, three from the European Space Agency (ESA) and one from Bulgaria. The remaining five are indigenously designed and developed by various centres of the state-run ISRO. The spacecraft was blasted off Oct 22 onboard the 316-tonne Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV-C11) from the Satish Dhawan space centre at Sriharikota spaceport, about 80 km north of Chennai.


source :
http://news.in.msn.com/

Partial Solar eclipse in India

A total eclipse of the sun will occur on Friday afternoon and it will be visible as a partial eclipse throughout India.

In general, the total eclipse will be visible in the region covering northern and eastern parts of North America, Greenland, northern Europe and Asia except Japan.

Considering the earth as a whole, the eclipse begins at 1:34 IST when the shadow of the moon first touches the earth at local sunrise near a point in the North Atlantic Ocean close to New Found land in Canada.

The eclipse ends at 6:08 IST when the moon’s shadow finally leaves the earth at local sunset near a point in the Bay of Bengal close to Andaman Nicobar Island.

The total phase begins at 2:53 IST at a point near southeastern coast of Victoria Island in northern Canada.

The total phase ends at 4:50 IST at a point near Xi''an in southeast China.

The greatest phase of the eclipse with magnitude 1.040 occurs at 3:51 IST near a point close to Nadym in northern Russia.

The duration of the total phase at this point is two minutes 30 seconds.

Next total eclipse of the sun will occur on July 22, 2009. The path of the totality of the same eclipse will pass through India.


source :
http://www.zeenews.com/