Oct 05,2022:Mangalyaan, India’s first interplanetary mission, was designed to run for six months. The Rs. 450 crore mission, however, kept on going for nearly nine years.
Now, it seems that the spacecraft’s wild journey has come to an end. According to sources in the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), the Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) has run out of fuel.
The mission has gone quiet now.
Mangalyaan was launched in 2013. The spacecraft has been in Mars’ orbit for longer than imagined.
Now, sources in ISRO have told news agency PTI, “Right now, there is no fuel left. The satellite battery has drained.”
Although the space agency is yet to make an official remark, it seems that the end has come. “The link has been lost,” added the sources.
It seems that back-to-back eclipses, including one that lasted for seven-and-half hours, are the primary cause of Mangalyaan’s quiet death.
“The satellite battery is designed to handle eclipses of one hour and 40 minutes, a longer eclipse would drain the battery,” said an official.
ISRO has been trying to perform orbital maneuvers to take the spacecraft to a different orbit to avoid eclipses.
Mangalyaan was an example to the world in efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and longevity. “It has done its job and yielded significant scientific results,” the sources said.
MOM carried five instruments, including the Mars Color Camera (MCC), which took over 1,000 images and published a Mars Atlas.
It carried five payloads to collect data on surface geology, morphology, atmospheric processes, surface temperature, and atmospheric escape process.
July 12,2022:US President Joe Biden has unveiled the first full-colour image of the cosmos taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, offering what NASA said was “the deepest, sharpest infrared view of the universe” ever taken.
During a ceremony at the White House on Monday evening, Biden said it was “an historic day” as the world’s largest and most powerful space science telescope offered a “new window into the history of our universe”.
“Today we’re going to get a glimpse at the first light to shine through that window,” Biden said shortly before the release of the image, which showed bright white, yellow and orange lights that NASA said represented “galaxies once invisible to us”.
“Light from other worlds, orbiting stars far beyond our own,” Biden said. “The oldest-documented light in the history of the universe from over 13 billion – let me say that again – 13 billion years ago.”
The image will be followed on Tuesday by the release of four more galactic beauty shots from the telescope’s initial outward gazes.
“We’re going to give humanity a new view of the cosmos,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson told reporters last month in a briefing. “And it’s a view that we’ve never seen before.”
The $9bn Webb observatory, named after the man who ran NASA during the Apollo space programme that put humans on the moon in the 1960s, was designed to peer through the cosmos to the dawn of the known universe, ushering in a revolutionary era of astronomical discovery.
It soared off from French Guiana on South America’s northeastern coast on December 25, 2021, before reaching its final destination 1.6 million kilometres (one million miles) from Earth less than a month later. NASA is collaborating on Webb with the European and Canadian space agencies.
The highly anticipated release of its first imagery follows a six-month process of remotely unfurling Webb’s various components, aligning its mirrors and calibrating instruments.
With Webb now finely tuned and fully focused, scientists will embark on a competitively selected list of missions exploring the evolution of galaxies, the life cycles of stars, the atmospheres of distant exoplanets and the moons of our outer solar system.
Built to view its subjects chiefly in the infrared spectrum, Webb is about 100 times more sensitive than its 30-year-old predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, which operates mainly at optical and ultraviolet wavelengths.
Hubble has stared as far back as 13.4 billion years. It found the light wave signature of an extremely bright galaxy in 2016. Astronomers measure how far back they look in light years, with one light year being 9.5 trillion kilometres (5.9 trillion miles).
“Webb can see backwards in time to just after the Big Bang by looking for galaxies that are so far away that the light has taken many billions of years to get from those galaxies to our telescopes,” said Jonathan Gardner, Webb’s deputy project scientist during a recent briefing.
The much larger light-collecting surface of Webb’s primary mirror – an array of 18 hexagonal segments of gold-coated beryllium metal – enables it to observe objects at greater distances, thus further back in time, than Hubble or any other telescope.
All five of Webb’s introductory targets were previously known to scientists.
Among them are two enormous clouds of gas and dust blasted into space by stellar explosions to form incubators for new stars – the Carina Nebula and the Southern Ring Nebula, each thousands of light years away from Earth.
The collection also includes two very different sets of galaxy clusters. One of those, Stephan’s Quintet, was first identified in 1877 and encompasses several galaxies described by NASA as “locked in a cosmic dance of repeated close encounters”.
The other is a much more recent discovery dubbed SMACS 0723, featuring objects in the foreground so massive that they act as “gravitational lenses”, a visual distortion of space that greatly magnifies the light coming from behind them to expose even fainter objects farther away and further back in time.
How far back and what showed up on camera remains to be seen.
Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s science mission chief, recently told reporters that with the new telescope, the cosmos is “giving up secrets that had been there for many, many decades, centuries, millennia”.
“It’s not an image. It’s a new world view that you’re going to see,” he said.
Bejing,June 04,2022: China will launch a spacecraft on Sunday carrying three astronauts to the core module of the unfinished Chinese space station, where they will work and live for six months as construction enters advanced stages.
A Long March-2F rocket carrying the Shenzhou-14 spacecraft is set to blast off from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in the northwestern province of Gansu at 10:44 a.m. local time (0244 GMT) on Sunday, a China Manned Space Agency official told a news conference on Saturday.
Mission commander Chen Dong will be accompanied by Liu Yang and Cai Xuzhe aboard Shenzhou, meaning “Divine Vessel” in Chinese.
“All preparations for the launch are basically ready,” said Lin Xiqiang, an agency official.
Shenzhou-14 will be the third of four crewed missions – and the seventh of a total of 11 missions – needed to complete the space station by the end of the year.
China began constructing its three-module space station in April 2021 with the launch of Tianhe – the first and biggest of the station’s three modules.
Tianhe, slightly larger than a metro bus, will form the living quarters of visiting astronauts once the T-shaped space station is completed.
Following Shenzhou-14, the remaining two modules – the laboratory cabins Wentian and Mengtian – will be launched in July and October, respectively.
Wentian will feature a robotic arm, an airlock cabin for trips outside of the station, and living quarters for an additional three astronauts during crew rotations.
The Shenzhou-14 crew will help with the setup of Wentian and Mengtian and conduct functionality tests on both modules.
The space station will have a designed lifespan of a decade. At 180 tonnes, it will be slightly heavier than Russia’s decommissioned Mir, and about 20% of the International Space Station by mass.