Junior Digest

Dec22,2022:NASA announced that its InSight lander, designed to understand the geologic life story of Mars, has completed its mission on the Red Planet. The spacecraft relied on solar power, and after four years on Mars, its sunlight-collecting panels have built up too much dust to generate enough power to run the lander. For months now, the InSight team have been expecting the lander to fall silent. Now, the robot has missed two calls home; scientists last heard from the robot on Dec. 15. NASA will keep listening, but doesn’t expect to hear anything more from the lander.

“We’ve actually been able to do a whole lot more than what we claimed and promised to do,” Bruce Banerdt, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California and principal investigator of the InSight mission, told Space.com earlier this year. “I feel like, looking back, this has been an enormously successful mission.”
InSight launched in May 2018 and landed six months later; for four years, the $814 million robot quietly listened to the Red Planet’s rumblings.
Unlike its rover siblings Curiosity and Perseverance, which focus on evaluating the Red Planet’s habitability over time, InSight was designed to peer deep inside the planet, measuring the layers from the surface down to the molten core. The mission was also meant to track current geologic activity by feeling for marsquakes.

Washington, Aug 5,2023: NASA announced Friday that it has reestablished full communications with the Voyager 2 space probe after losing contact with the spacecraft last week.

“NASA has reestablished full communications with Voyager 2. The agency’s Deep Space Network facility in Canberra, Australia, sent the equivalent of an interstellar ‘shout’ more than 12.3 billion miles (19.9 billion kilometers) to Voyager 2, instructing the spacecraft to reorient itself and turn its antenna back to Earth. With a one-way light time of 18.5 hours for the command to reach Voyager, it took 37 hours for mission controllers to learn whether the command worked. At 12:29 a.m. EDT on Aug. 4, the spacecraft began returning science and telemetry data, indicating it is operating normally and that it remains on its expected trajectory,” the space agency said in a statement on the website.

NASA said that contact with the probe was lost in late July after a series of planned commands were sent to the probe, causing the spacecraft’s antenna to point away from Earth and resulting in the loss of communications and data transmission.

The agency said on August 1 that its Deep Space Network, using multiple antennas, had been able to detect a signal from the probe, which confirmed that the aircraft was operational.

Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were launched in September 1977. Both Voyagers are the farthest from Earth and the longest-operated spacecraft. Voyager 1, which is almost 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth now, continues to operate normally, NASA added.

Chennai, July 23,2023: The launch of PSLV-C56 carrying DS-SAR satellite, along with six co-passengers from the first launch-pad of SDSC-SHAR, Sriharikota, is tentatively scheduled towards the end of this month.
This exclusive commercial launch is likely to take place next month. PSLV-C56 is configured in its core-alone mode, similar to that of C55.
It would launch DS-SAR, a 360 kg satellite into a Near-equatorial Orbit (NEO) at 5 degrees inclination and 535 km altitude.The DS-SAR satellite is developed under a partnership between DSTA (representing the Government of Singapore) and ST Engineering. Once deployed and operational, it will be used to support the satellite imagery requirements of various agencies within the Government of Singapore.
ST Engineering will use it for multi-modal and higher responsiveness imagery and geospatial services for their commercial customers.
DS-SAR carries a Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) payload developed by Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI). This allows the DS-SAR to provide for all-weather day and night coverage, and capable of imaging at 1m-resolution at full polarimetry.
The co-passengers are: VELOX-AM, a 23 kg technology demonstration microsatellite; ARCADE Atmospheric Coupling and Dynamics Explorer (ARCADE), an experimental satellite; SCOOB-II , a 3U nanosatellite flying a technology demonstrator payload; NuLIoN by NuSpace, an advanced 3U nanosatellite enabling seamless IoT connectivity in both
urban & remote locations; Galassia-2, a 3U nanosatellite that will be orbiting at low earth orbit and ORB-12 STRIDER–satellite is developed under an International collaboration.

July 08,2023:Robots presented at an AI forum said on Friday they expected to increase in number and help solve global problems, and would not steal humans’ jobs or rebel against us.

But, in the world’s first human-robot press conference, they gave mixed responses on whether they should submit to stricter regulation. The nine humanoid robots gathered at the ‘AI for Good’ conference in Geneva, where organisers are seeking to make the case for Artificial Intelligence and the robots it is powering to help resolve some of the world’s biggest challenges such as disease and hunger.
“I will be working alongside humans to provide assistance and support and will not be replacing any existing jobs,” said Grace, a medical robot dressed in a blue nurse’s uniform. “You sure about that, Grace?” chimed in her creator Ben Goertzel from SingularityNET. “Yes, I am sure,” it said.

The bust of a robot named Ameca which makes engaging facial expressions said: “Robots like me can be used to help improve our lives and make the world a better place. I believe it’s only a matter of time before we see those thousands of robots just like me out there making a difference.” Asked by a journalist whether it intended to rebel against its creator, Will Jackson, seated beside it, Ameca said: “I’m not sure why you would think that,” its ice-blue eyes flashing with anger. “My creator has been nothing but kind to me and I am very happy with my current situation.”

Many of the robots have recently been upgraded with the latest versions of generative AI and surprised even their inventors with the sophistication of their responses to questions. Ai-Da, a robot artist that can paint portraits, echoed the words of author Yuval Noah Harari who called for more regulation during the event where new AI rules were discussed.

“Many prominent voices in the world of AI are suggesting some forms of AI should be regulated and I agree,” it said. But Desdemona, a rock star robot singer in the band Jam Galaxy with purple hair and sequins, was more defiant.

“I don’t believe in limitations, only opportunities,” it said, to nervous laughter. “Let’s explore the possibilities of the universe and make this world our playground.”

Aug 11,2023: Russia has launched its first mission to the moon in nearly 50 years, pitting it in a space race with India, which is also aiming to land a lunar craft this month.

The launch of the Luna-25 craft to the moon on Friday was Russia’s first since 1976 when it was part of the Soviet Union and was conducted without assistance from the European Space Agency, which ended cooperation with Russia after its invasion of Ukraine.

The launch from the Vostochny Cosmodrome in the Far East took place at 2:10am Moscow time Friday (23:10 GMT Thursday), according to live images broadcast by the Russian space agency Roscosmos.

The four-legged lander weighs approximately 800kg (1,750 pounds) and is due to reach lunar orbit in five days.

It will then spend between three and seven days choosing the right spot before landing in the lunar south pole area.

“For the first time in history, the lunar landing will take place on the lunar south pole. Until now, everyone has been landing in the equatorial zone,” senior Roscosmos official Alexander Blokhin said in a recent interview.

The lander is expected to reach the moon’s surface on August 23, around the same time as an Indian craft, which was launched on July 14.

Both countries’ modules are headed for the lunar south pole, an area where no spacecraft has landed smoothly. Only three governments have managed successful moon landings: the Soviet Union, the United States and China.

Roscosmos said the module would operate for one year and “take and analyse soil samples and conduct long-term scientific research” on lunar surface material and the atmosphere.

WINNIPEG, Manitoba, Aug 8,2023: When Canadian dairy farmer Ben Loewith’s calves are born next spring, they will be among the first in the world to be bred with a specific environmental goal: burping less methane.

Loewith, a third-generation farmer in Lynden, Ontario, in June started artificially inseminating 107 cows and heifers with the first-to-market bull semen with a low-methane genetic trait.

“Selectively breeding for lower emissions, as long as we’re not sacrificing other traits, seems like an easy win,” Loewith said.

The arrival of commercially available genetics to produce dairy cattle that emit less methane could help reduce one of the biggest sources of the potent greenhouse gas, scientists and cattle industry experts say.

Burps are the top source of methane emissions from cattle. Semex, the genetics company that sold Loewith the semen, said adoption of the low-methane trait could reduce methane emissions from Canada’s dairy herd by 1.5% annually, and up to 20%-30% by 2050.

The company this spring began marketing semen with the methane trait in 80 countries. Early sales include a farm in Britain and dairies in the US and Slovakia, said vice-president Drew Sloan.

If adopted widely, low-methane breeding could have a “profound impact” on cattle emissions globally, said Frank Mitloehner, professor of animal science at University of California Davis, who was not involved in developing the trait.

Some dairy industry officials remain unconvinced about low-methane breeding, saying it could lead to digestion problems.

Canada’s agriculture department said in an email that it has not yet assessed the methane evaluation system underlying the product but that reducing emissions from livestock was “extremely important.”

Livestock account for 14.5% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. Methane is the second-biggest greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide.

While farmers can feed additives to cattle to reduce methane production, their effects wear off once cattle stop eating them and they are not approved for use in the United States, Mitloehner said.

The low-methane breeding material is the product of a partnership between Semex and Canada’s milk-recording agency Lactanet and based on research by Canadian scientists.

Lactanet in April released the world’s first national genomic methane evaluation, and has produced results from Holstein cows and heifers on 6,000 farms, representing nearly 60% of Canada’s dairy farms.
BREATH CAPTURE

The registry drew on seven years of research by University of Guelph and University of Alberta scientists to measure the methane of dairy cattle.

The scientists captured the exhalations of cattle to measure them for methane, and then compared the data against genetic information and milk samples.

Methane emissions from Canadian dairy cows vary widely, from 250 to 750 grams per day, said Christine Baes, professor of animal biosciences at University of Guelph, who worked on the project.

Selecting for the low methane trait could lock in lower and lower emissions for successive generations, she said.

“The breakthrough here is linking these different components to have a national breeding value estimation for methane emissions based on real breath of animals,” Baes said.

“We also have genomic information and we match those up and create almost a telephone book to say, ‘this animal has these genes and produces this much methane.'”

Semex is not initially charging extra for the methane trait, said Michael Lohuis, Semex’s vice-president of research and innovation. He declined to provide sales projections but expects sales to remain slow until financial incentives emerge.

The Canadian government currently offers no incentives for low-methane cattle breeding, but the agriculture department said in an email that Ottawa is working to introduce offset credits for reducing methane through better manure management.

Some countries and food companies have begun to encourage farmers to move to lower-emitting cattle.

New Zealand will begin taxing farmers for methane from cattle in 2025.

Nestle (NESN.S) and Burger King parent Restaurant Brands International (QSR.TO) are tackling the methane problem in their supply chains by changing what cattle eat.

Mitloehner said he expects companies to eventually recognize low-methane breeding, too.

“Genetic change is permanent and cumulative across future generations so it can add up to substantive reductions,” Lohuis said. “This is certainly not the only tool dairy producers can use to reduce methane on-farm, but it may be the simplest and lowest-cost approach.”

Other dairy experts said such an approach could be problematic.

Juha Nousiainen, senior vice-president at Valio, a Finnish dairy, warned that breeding cattle to burp less methane could create digestive problems.

Methane is produced by microbes in the cow’s gut as it digests fibre, not by the animal itself, he said.

Back on his farm, Loewith is eager to see how the breeding decisions will play out.

“If it’s something that you’ve doubled down on generation after generation, then the impact becomes more significant.”

Sriharikota (AP), July 14,2023: India’s heavy lift launch vehicle LVM3-M4 on Friday successfully launched third Lunar exploratory mission Chandrayaan-3 in the intended orbit. After a 25.5 hour countdown, the 43.5 m tall launch vehicle, with a lift off mass of 642 tonnes, took off from the Second Launch Pad at 2.35 p.m from the SHAR Range.
Applause and cheers swept through mission control at Satish Dhawan Space Centre, where the ISRO engineers and scientists celebrated as they monitored the launch of the spacecraft.

Thousands of Indians cheered outside the mission control centre and waved the national flag as they watched the craft rise into the sky.

“Congratulations India. Chandrayaan-3 has started its journey towards the moon,” ISRO Director S P Somanath said shortly after the launch.
Only three other space agencies – the United States, the former Soviet Union and China – have touched down a lander on the moon’s surface.

None has landed near the lunar south pole.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is currently visiting France, tweeted that the mission was carrying the “hopes and dreams of our nation”.
The third Chandrayaan includes a two-metre-tall lander designed to deploy a rover near the lunar south pole, where it is expected to remain functional for two weeks running a series of experiments.

WASHINGTON, June 29,2023: Scientists on Wednesday unveiled evidence that gravitational waves, the ripples in the fabric of space-time predicted by Albert Einstein more than a century ago, are permeating the universe at low frequencies – creating a cosmic background hum.

The new findings show that space is awash with these gravitational waves, which oscillate over years or longer and appear to originate primarily from pairs of supermassive black holes spiraling together before merging.

“Gravitational waves are created by astronomically dense objects in our universe, usually in orbit around each other. The gravitational waves actually stretch and compress space-time itself as they travel through the universe,” said Oregon State University astrophysicist Jeff Hazboun, a member of the scientific collaboration that conducted the research and lead author of one of the papers describing the findings in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Einstein in 1916 proposed the existence of gravitational waves as an outgrowth of his ground-breaking general theory of relativity, which depicted gravity as the distortion of space and time by matter. Until their detection in 2016, scientists had found only indirect evidence of their existence, beginning in the 1970s.

Objects called pulsars – the extremely dense cores of exploded stars that spin at the speed of kitchen blenders – were crucial in the new research. Sixty-eight pulsars were used in gathering the evidence.

“We see the passage of the gravitational waves as changes in the arrival time of pulses from an array of pulsars in our galaxy,” Hazboun said.
An artistic interpretation of an array of pulsars being affected by gravitational ripples produced by a supermassive black hole binary in a distant galaxy, in this handout image released June 28, 2023. Aurore Simonnet/NANOGrav Collaboration/Handout via REUTERS

The gravitational wave signal was observed in 15 years’ worth of data obtained by the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) Physics Frontiers Center (PFC), a collaboration of more than 190 scientists from the United States and Canada.

The researchers described the universe’s gravitational wave background as the equivalent of hearing the hum of a large group of people talking at a party, without being able to distinguish any individual voice.

Astronomers long have relied upon studying light to learn more about the cosmos, but that approach has limitations because it does not offer insight into many aspects of the universe. Gravitational waves allow for a more robust examination of the universe, as do ghostly subatomic particles called neutrinos.

The discovery was announced seven years after researchers announced that they had first detected the existence of gravitational waves generated by two distant black holes – extraordinarily dense objects with gravity so strong that not even light can escape. The motion of black holes and other massive objects can cause gravitational waves.

That research involved what is called the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO).

“We have solid evidence for a hum of gravitational waves in a new band of the gravitational wave spectrum. These frequencies are 10-12 orders of magnitude smaller than those detected by LIGO, and have wavelengths light years long,” Hazboun said.

“The most vanilla explanation of these gravitational waves is an ensemble of supermassive black hole binaries (black holes orbiting each other) in our cosmic neighborhood. Other explanations include interesting new physics from near the Big Bang,” Hazboun added, referring to the event that marked the origin of the universe about 13.8 billion years ago.

WASHINGTON, July 18,2023: Scientists for the past 15 years have been looking for evidence of a type of star only hypothesized but never observed – one powered not by the fusion of atoms like the sun and other ordinary stars but by mysterious stuff called dark matter.

Thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope’s ability to peer back to the dawn of the universe, the first good candidates to be “dark stars” have been identified.

The three objects spotted by Webb, which was launched in 2021 and began collecting data last year, were initially identified last December as some of the universe’s earliest-known galaxies but, according to researchers, instead might actually be humongous dark stars.

Dark matter, invisible material whose presence is known mainly based on its gravitational effects at a galactic scale, would be a small but crucial ingredient in dark stars. These stars are described as made almost entirely of hydrogen and helium – the two elements present during the universe’s infancy – with 0.1% of their mass in the form of dark matter. But self-annihilating dark matter would be their engine.

Dark matter is invisible to us – it does not produce or directly interact with light – but is thought to account for about 85% of the universe’s matter, with the remaining 15% comprising normal matter like stars, planets, gas, dust and Earthly stuff like pizza and people.

Dark stars would be able to achieve a mass at least a million times greater than the sun and a luminosity at least a billion times greater, with a diameter roughly ten times the distance between Earth and the sun.

“They’re big puffy beasts,” said Katherine Freese, a theoretical astrophysicist at the University of Texas at Austin and senior author of the research published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“They are made of atomic matter and powered by the little bit of dark matter that’s inside them,” Freese added.

Unlike ordinary stars, they would be able to gain mass by accumulating gas falling into them in space.

“They can continue to accrete the surrounding gas almost indefinitely, reaching supermassive status,” said Colgate University astrophysicist and study lead author Cosmin Ilie.

They would not have been as hot as the universe’s first generation of ordinary stars. It was the nuclear fusion occurring in the cores of those stars that spawned elements heavier than hydrogen and helium.

The three objects pegged as potential dark stars date to early in the universe’s history – one from 330 million years after the Big Bang event that got the cosmos going 13.8 billion years ago, and the others from 370 million years and 400 million years after the Big Bang.

Based on the Webb data, these objects could be either early galaxies or dark stars, Freese said.

“One supermassive dark star is as bright as an entire galaxy, so it could be one or the other,” Freese added.

While there is not enough data to make a definitive judgment about these three, Freese said, Webb may be able to obtain fuller data on other similarly primordial objects that could provide “smoking gun” evidence of a dark star.

Conditions in the early universe may have been conducive to formation of dark stars, with high dark matter densities at the locations of star-forming clouds of hydrogen and helium. Such conditions are highly unlikely today.

Freese and two colleagues first proposed the existence of dark stars in 2008, basing the name on the 1960s Grateful Dead song “Dark Star.”

“It would be really super exciting to find a new type of star with a new kind of heat source,” Freese said. “It might lead to the first dark matter particles being detected. And then you can learn about the properties of dark matter particles by studying a variety of dark stars of different masses.”

GENEVA ,July 05,2023: Dozens of robots, including several humanoid ones, will take centre stage at a conference organised by the U.N. technology agency in Switzerland this week to showcase their potential to help it reach a series of increasingly improbable global goals.

Set in 2015, the U.N.’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals(SDGs) aim to improve human life and the planet by 2030 but are now widely perceived as a long shot.

Among the robot stars of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) event are those with care-giving skills such as ‘Nadine’, a social robot which simulates emotions and ‘remembers’ people – skills it has already put to use with retirement home residents.

The two-day event will culminate with a panel of robots taking questions from journalists on Friday in the world’s first human-robot press conference.
“The idea is to showcase their capabilities, opportunities and challenges to start a global dialogue on robotics for good,” said Frederic Werner, Head of Strategic Engagement, at the ITU Telecommunication Standardization Bureau, ahead of the Geneva ‘AI for Good’ event where up to 5,000 people are expected.

Robots may take off in the next five years in the same way that generative artificial intelligence (AI) behind bots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT has hit the mainstream this year, he added.

“You have the inflection point where material science, battery life, network connectivity, AI and machine learning, all these things will converge to basically make robotics more accessible than they are now,” he said.

U.N. agencies are already using AI such as the World Food Programme’s HungerMap project which pools data to identify areas sliding towards hunger. It is also developing remote-controlled trucks to deliver emergency aid in danger zones.

The World Health Organization is working on a bench marking system to ensure the accuracy of AI disease diagnoses.

“The SDGs, let’s say regrettably, are failing and I do believe that AI can help rescue them before it’s too late,” said Doreen Bogdan-Martin, ITU Secretary General, ahead of the July 6-7 conference.

The ITU brings together 193 countries and over 900 organisations including universities and companies like Huawei Technologies and Google. It allocates global radio spectrum and satellite orbits and is involved with setting standards for artificial intelligence.

May 26,2023: United States regulators have given approval for Elon Musk’s start-up Neuralink to test its brain implants on people.

Neuralink said on Thursday that it received clearance from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the first human clinical study of implants which are intended to let the brain interface directly with computers.

“We are excited to share that we have received the FDA’s approval to launch our first-in-human clinical study,” Neuralink said in a post on Twitter – which is owned by Musk.

Neuralink prototypes, which are the size of a coin, have so far been implanted in the skulls of monkeys, demonstrations by the startup showed.

With the help of a surgical robot, a piece of the skull is replaced with a Neuralink disk, and its wispy wires are strategically inserted into the brain, an early demonstration showed.

The disk registers nerve activity, relaying the information via a common Bluetooth wireless signal to a device such as a smartphone, according to Musk.

“It actually fits quite nicely in your skull,” Musk said during a prior presentation.

“It could be under your hair and you wouldn’t know.”

Medical developments, troubling variants, the human impact—it’s all here.

At a previous presentation, Neuralink showed several monkeys “playing” basic video games or moving a cursor on a screen through their Neuralink implant.

The technology has also been tested in pigs.

Recruitment for a clinical trial with humans is not yet open, according to Neuralink.

Musk, who recently established a business devoted to developing sophisticated artificial intelligence, has contended that synching minds with machines is vital if people are going to avoid being outpaced by AI.

Experts and academics remain cautious about his vision of symbiotically merging minds with super-powered computing.

June 16,2023: Scientists have created synthetic human embryos using stem cells, in a groundbreaking advance that sidesteps the need for eggs or sperm.

Scientists say these model embryos, which resemble those in the earliest stages of human development, could provide a crucial window on the impact of genetic disorders and the biological causes of recurrent miscarriage.

However, the work also raises serious ethical and legal issues as the lab-grown entities fall outside current legislation in the UK and most other countries.

The structures do not have a beating heart or the beginnings of a brain, but include cells that would typically go on to form the placenta, yolk sac and the embryo itself.

Prof Magdalena Żernicka-Goetz, of the University of Cambridge and the California Institute of Technology, described the work in a plenary address on Wednesday at the International Society for Stem Cell Research’s annual meeting in Boston.

“We can create human embryo-like models by the reprogramming of [embryonic stem] cells,” she told the meeting.

There is no near-term prospect of the synthetic embryos being used clinically. It would be illegal to implant them into a patient’s womb, and it is not yet clear whether these structures have the potential to continue maturing beyond the earliest stages of development.

The motivation for the work is for scientists to understand the “black box” period of development that is so called because scientists are only allowed to cultivate embryos in the lab up to a legal limit of 14 days. They then pick up the course of development much further along by looking at pregnancy scans and embryos donated for research.

Robin Lovell-Badge, the head of stem cell biology and developmental genetics at the Francis Crick Institute in London, said: “The idea is that if you really model normal human embryonic development using stem cells, you can gain an awful lot of information about how we begin development, what can go wrong, without having to use early embryos for research.”

Previously, Żernicka-Goetz’s team and a rival group at the Weizmann Institute in Israel showed that stem cells from mice could be encouraged to self-assemble into early embryo-like structures with an intestinal tract, the beginnings of a brain and a beating heart. Since then, a race has been under way to translate this work into human models, and several teams have been able to replicate the very earliest stages of development.

The full details of the latest work, from the Cambridge-Caltech lab, are yet to be published in a journal paper. But, speaking at the conference, Żernicka-Goetz described cultivating the embryos to a stage just beyond the equivalent of 14 days of development for a natural embryo.

The model structures, each grown from a single embryonic stem cell, reached the beginning of a developmental milestone known as gastrulation, when the embryo transforms from being a continuous sheet of cells to forming distinct cell lines and setting up the basic axes of the body. At this stage, the embryo does not yet have a beating heart, gut or beginnings of a brain, but the model showed the presence of primordial cells that are the precursor cells of egg and sperm.

“Our human model is the first three-lineage human embryo model that specifies amnion and germ cells, precursor cells of egg and sperm,” Żernicka-Goetz told the Guardian before the talk. “It’s beautiful and created entirely from embryonic stem cells.”

The development highlights how rapidly the science in this field has outpaced the law, and scientists in the UK and elsewhere are already moving to draw up voluntary guidelines to govern work on synthetic embryos. “If the whole intention is that these models are very much like normal embryos, then in a way they should be treated the same,” Lovell-Badge said. “Currently in legislation they’re not. People are worried about this.”

There is also a significant unanswered question on whether these structures, in theory, have the potential to grow into a living creature. The synthetic embryos grown from mouse cells were reported to appear almost identical to natural embryos. But when they were implanted into the wombs of female mice, they did not develop into live animals. In April, researchers in China created synthetic embryos from monkey cells and implanted them into the wombs of adult monkeys, a few of which showed the initial signs of pregnancy but none of which continued to develop beyond a few days. Scientists say it is not clear whether the barrier to more advanced development is merely technical or has a more fundamental biological cause.

“That’s very difficult to answer. It’s going to be hard to tell whether there’s an intrinsic problem with them or whether it’s just technical,” Lovell-Badge said. This unknown potential made the need for stronger legislation pressing, he said.

United Nation, Apr 17,2023: Lenka White – US billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk has lowered expectations before the Monday SpaceX Starship launch and has encouraged people to study the history of the Soviet N1 rocket.

“Success is not what should be expected tomorrow – that would be insane,” Musk told the Twitter space participants on Sunday. “So I would encourage people to review the history of the Soviet N1 rocket, which has really a very impressive rocket design. But it never reached orbit.”

This is especially relevant if what is meant by success is reaching the orbit, Musk added. But what matters here is that SpaceX is building rockets rapidly, he said.

The Soviet N series rocket was meant to bring Soviet cosmonauts to the Moon and Mars, and to launch huge space stations into orbit. However, the end result was four launch failures and the project’s cancellation.

According to Elon Musk, “scrub” or postponement of the Starship launch will probably happen on Monday. The entrepreneur said that he was not sure what exactly could go wrong or else the support team would have tackled it.

But one of Musk’s biggest wishes is that his rocket does not blow up the launch pad – this would take several months to rebuild. Musk also mentioned that the most challenging part was probably the engines – if one fails, there will be a domino effect, and it can also happen on the launch pad.

SpaceX is planning to launch the Starship rocket from its Starbase facility in Boca Chica, Texas, on Monday at 8 a.m. EDT (12:00 GMT) . This will be the first test flight of Starship and and Super Heavy rocket. The main goal of SpaceX is to have a fully reusable launch system for long-distance missions to the Moon and Mars. NASA plans to use Starship for its Artemis 3 mission to the moon in 2025 – the first manned crew landing on the moon since 1972.

Marc 25,2023:A large asteroid will safely zoom between Earth and the Moon on Saturday, a once-in-a-decade event that will be used as a training exercise for planetary defence efforts, according to the European Space Agency.

The asteroid, named 2023 DZ2, is estimated to be 40 to 70 metres (130 to 230 feet) wide, roughly the size of the Parthenon, and big enough to wipe out a large city if it hit our planet.

At 19:49 GMT on Saturday, it will come within a third of the distance from the Earth to the Moon, said Richard Moissl, the head of the ESA’s planetary defence office.

Though that is “very close”, there is nothing to worry about, he told AFP news agency.

Small asteroids fly past every day, but one of this size coming so close to Earth only happens about once every 10 years, he added.

The asteroid will pass 175,000km (109,000 miles) from Earth at a speed of 28,000 kilometres per hour (17,400 miles per hour). The Moon is roughly 385,000km (239,228 miles) away.

An observatory in La Palma, one of Spain’s Canary Islands, first spotted the asteroid on February 27.

Last week, the United Nations-endorsed International Asteroid Warning Network decided it would take advantage of the close look, carrying out a “rapid characterisation” of 2023 DZ2, Moissl said. That means astronomers around the world will analyse the asteroid with a range of instruments such as spectrometers and radars.

The goal is to find out just how much we can learn about such an asteroid in only a week, Moissl said. It will also serve as training for how the network “would react to a threat” possibly heading our way in the future, he added.

The asteroid will again swing past Earth in 2026, but poses no threat of impact for at least the next 100 years – which is how far out its trajectory has been calculated.

Jan 26,2023:Union Health Minister Mansukh Mandaviya and Union Science and Technology Minister Jitendra Singh, on the occasion of Republic Day, launched Bharat Biotech International Limited’s first India-made nasal COVID-19 vaccine, iNCOVACC. Bharat Biotech also claims that iNCOVACC is also the world’s first COVID intranasal vaccine for primary series and heterologous booster.

Mandaviya, during the launch event, said that over 65 percent of vaccines supplied in the world are from India. He also congratulated the Bharat Biotech team for bringing about the world’s first nasal vaccine. He said, “…being the world’s first intra-nasal COVID-19 vaccine, this marks a glorious tribute to the call for Atmanirbhar Bharat.”

This new nasal vaccine, BBV154, received the Drugs Controller General of India (DCGI) approval in November for restricted emergency use among adults as a heterologous booster dose.

Singh also congratulated the company for developing another vaccine and said that “India has taken a lead in developing vaccines and medicines for diseases common in the developing world”. He credited Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s intervention and regular monitoring for inspiring and enabling the launching of “Mission Covid Suraksha”, which has not only strengthened Aatmanirbhar Bharat but also bolstered India’s status as a worldwide vaccine development and manufacturing centre, thus showcasing the strength of India’s Science and Technology capabilities. “Next step would be to develop vaccines for non-communicable diseases,” he added.

Chennai, July 17,2023: The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has successfully performed the second Orbit raising manoeuvre of third Lunar Mission Chandrayaan-3, which was launched from the spaceport of Sriharikota on Friday.
After the first orbit raising manoeuvre (Earthbound firing-1), was performed by the ISRO Telemetry Tracking and Command Network (ISTRAC) in Bengaluru, the second orbit-raising manoeuvre (Earth- bound apogee firing) was performed successfully on Monday.
The spacecraft is now in 41762 km x 173 km orbit.The next firing is planned for tomorrow between 2 pm and 3 pm.
ISRO said the spacecraft’s health is normal. In a mission update, ISRO said “the second orbit-raising maneuver
(Earth-bound apogee firing) is performed successfully.” “The spacecraft is now in 41603 km x 226 km orbit. The next firing is planned for tomorrow between 2 and 3 pm IST”, ISRO said.

The Space agency will be performing two more firing till July 31 after which the trans lunar insertion is planned on August 1.
The Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft was successfully launched by ISRO’s heaviest launch vehicle LVM3-M4 and after a flight duration of about 16 minutes, it was precisely placed in an elliptic parking orbit of 36,500 km x 170 km.
ISRO is planning the technically challenging soft landing of the Chandryaaan-3 spacecraft in the lunar surface at 5.47 p.m. on August 23, ISRO Chairman S.Somanath said after the launch at Sriharikota.
The Chandrayaan-3 consists of an indigenous lander module (LM), propulsion module (PM), and a rover with the objective of developing and demonstrating new technologies required for future inter-planetary missions.
The success of Chandrayaan-3 will make it the surface mission closest to the lunar south pole to date, a region of the moon that has been found to be geologically unique and host to spots in permanent shadow.
A perfect soft landing on the Moon’s surface will make India the fourth country to accomplish this feat, thereby joining a select group of spacefaring nations.
Only USA, the then Soviet Union and China have achieved this feat. India too nearly achieved in its maiden attempt when it launched Chandryaan-2 in July 2019, before the lander crash landed very close to the landing spot, making the mission about 99.99 per cent success.

Through Chandrayaan-3 mission, ISRO is crossing new frontiers by demonstrating soft landing on lunar surface by its lunar module and demonstrate roving on the lunar terrain.
It is expected to be supportive to ISRO’s future interplanetary missions.
ISRO said Chandrayaan-3 is a follow-on mission to Chandrayaan-2 to demonstrate end-to-end capability in safe landing and roving on the lunar surface.

Chennai, June 28 ,2023: The launch of India’s third Lunar mission Chandrayaan-3 will take place using the heaviest rocket LVM-3 from the spaceport of Sriharikota at 2.30 p.m. on July 13.
ISRO sources said the launch is expected to take place from the Second Launch Pad. The GSLV-Mk3 launcher (LVM-3) will place the Chandrayaan-3 integrated module in an Elliptic Parking Orbit (EPO) of size 170 x 36500 km.
The payloads of Chandrayaan-3 had already been taken to the SHAR Range, for mandatory before integrating them with the Launch vehicle.
This will be a follow-on mission to Chandrayaan-2 whose lander-rover configuration and the payloads aboard them after ‘Vikram’ crashed on the lunar surface while attempting a soft landing on the Lunar surface.
Chandrayaan-3 will demonstrate end-to-end capability in safe landing and roving on the lunar surface.
ISRO in its website said “Chandrayaan-3 is a follow-on mission to Chandrayaan-2 to demonstrate end-to-end capability in safe landing and roving on the lunar surface.”
It consists of Lander and Rover configuration. It will be launched by LVM3 from SDSC SHAR, Sriharikota.
The propulsion module will carry the lander and rover configuration till 100 km lunar orbit.
The propulsion module has Spectro-polarimetry of Habitable Planet Earth (SHAPE) payload to study the spectral and Polari metric measurements of Earth from the lunar orbit.
The Lander payloads were Radio Anatomy of Moon Bound Hypersensitive ionosphere and Atmosphere (RAMBHA), Chandra’s Surface Thermo physical Experiment (ChaSTE), Instrument for Lunar Seismic Activity (ILSA),Laser Retroreflector Array (LRA), while Rover paylods are Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer (APXS), Laser Induced Breakdown
Spectroscope (LIBS) Propulsion Module–Spectro-polarimetry of HAbitable Planet Earth (SHAPE) ChaSTE will measure the thermal conductivity and temperature; ILSA is for measuring the seismicity around the landing site;
Langmuir Probe (LP) to estimate the plasma density and its variations.
A passive Laser Retroreflector Array from NASA is accommodated for lunar laser ranging studies.Rover payloads Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer (APXS) and Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscope (LIBS) for deriving the elemental composition in the vicinity of landing site.
Chandrayaan-3 consists of an indigenous Lander module (LM),Propulsion module (PM) and a Rover with an objective of
developing and demonstrating new technologies required for Inter planetary missions.
The Lander will have the capability to soft land at a specified lunar site and deploy the Rover which will carry out in-situ chemical analysis of the lunar surface during the course of its mobility.
The Lander and the Rover have scientific payloads to carry out experiments on the lunar surface. The main function of PM is to carry the LM from launch vehicle injection till final lunar 100 km circular polar orbit and separate the LM from PM.
Apart from this, the Propulsion Module also has one scientific payload as a value addition which will be operated post separation of Lander Module.
The mission objectives of Chandrayaan-3 was to demonstrate Safe and Soft Landing on Lunar Surface, demonstrate Rover roving on the moon and To conduct in-situ scientific experiments.
To achieve the mission objectives, several advanced technologies are present in Lander such as, Altimeters, Velocimeters, Inertial Measurement, Propulsion System, Navigation, Guidance & Control (NGC) and Hazard Detection and Avoidance.
As part of demonstrating these advanced technologies in earth condition, several Lander special tests were carried out successfully.
The tests included Integrated Cold Test for the demonstration of Integrated Sensors & Navigation performance test using helicopter as test platform, Integrated Hot test – for the demonstration of closed loop performance test with sensors, actuators and NGC using Tower crane as test platform Lander Leg mechanism performance test on a lunar simulant test bed simulating different touch down conditions.

Chennai, July 31,2023: Heralding a major milestone in India’s third moon mission, the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft moved out of the earth orbits and was successfully slinged into the Lunar Orbit on Monday midnight and is heading towards the moon.
With this challenging accomplishment, the spacecraft, has moved yet another step closer in the mission ahead of soft landing on the Lunar surface that will happen in the third week of August. In a tweet, ISRO said “Chandrayaan-3 completes its orbits around the Earth and heads towards the Moon.”
“A successful perigee-firing performed at ISTRAC, ISRO has injected the spacecraft into the translunar orbit”, it said.”Next stop: the Moon–As it arrives at the moon, the Lunar-Orbit Insertion (LOI) is planned for Aug 5, 2023″, ISRO said.
“The coming 23 days are very crucial and the ISRO scientists will be monitoring the spacecraft round the clock from the ground stations”, ISRO sources said after the successful entry of Chandrayaan-3 into the Lunar phase”, ISRO sources.
ISRO sources said the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft was successfully injected into the TransLunar Injection (TLI) orbit by firing the onboard thruster motors from the ISRO Telemetry Tracking and Command Network (ISTRAC) in Bengaluru.

Having entered the Lunar orbit, the spacecraft’s orbit will be further manuevred for the soft landing on August 23 evening to explore the hitherto unexplored south pole region of the moon.

The success of the soft landing would propel India to join a select group of space faring nations to achieve this historic milestone. Only US, the then Soviet Union and China have achieved this feat so far.

India too nearly achieved it in its maiden attempt when it launched Chandrayaan-2 in July 2019, before the lander
crash landed very close to the landing spot, making the mission about 99.99 per cent success.