India's first solar mission, if successful, will showcase ISRO's ability to explore the cosmos, explains Kumar Abishek.
Billionaire and Mahindra Group chairman Anand Mahindra along with top Silicon Valley investors Naval Ravikant and Balaji Srinivasan are backing space tech start-up Agnikul as part of a new funding round. Chennai-based Agnikul said, on Thursday, that it has raised $11 million in Series A funding round led by Mayfield India. It is the largest funding round for a private Indian space technology company in the country. Existing investors pi Ventures, Speciale Invest and Artha Venture Fund also invested in this round.
'Everybody spies on their friends as well as their enemies. That's the way the world works these days'
Indian Space Association (ISpA) chairman Jayant Patil has said that the executive council will debate whether it can include more telecom companies as founding members. The response came after some leading telcos said that they had been asked to be core members but preferred to be inducted as founding members. The key founders of the ISpA include the Bharti group through two companies (OneWeb and Airtel), L&T, Nelco, Walchandnagar, Alpha Designs and MapmyIndia.
The ongoing experiments on Moon, Mars and elsewhere could translate into better crop yields and hardier plants that could thrive in inhospitable parts of the world, says Devangshu Datta.
'He did not seek vote. He did not describe the missile launch as an achievement of the government. He only hailed the scientists. There was no electioneering involved'
The ISRO is aiming for a soft landing of the lander in the South Pole region of the moon where no country has gone so far.
Mission Shakti 'shows the development within India's military space programme, its desire to be seen as a global space power and its recognition of the potential dangers of China's counterspace programme.'
The four test pilots of the Indian Air Force, chosen for India's manned mission to space, have been undergoing training at the Yu.A. Gagarin Research and Test Cosmonaut Training Centre near Moscow since February.
The Chandrayaan-3 mission that aims for a soft landing on the moon's surface, paving the way for future interplanetary missions, carries six payloads that would help ISRO understand the lunar soil and also get the blue planet's photographs from the lunar orbit.
'ISRO's style is a terrific example of being able to survive, acknowledge failures, and then most importantly of all, learn from them to ensure that subsequent missions are successful.'
'A person weighing 68 kilograms on the Earth would weigh only over 11 kg on the Moon'
"Indeed, a satisfying feeling," K Radhakrishnan who as the then Chairman of Indian Space Research Oranisation (ISRO) led the Mars Orbiter Mission (Mangalyaan) team said on achieving the milestone.
Lt Col Raja "Grinder" Chari, 39 is in the batch of 2017.
A rare bonhomie among three private telecom companies in raising tariffs coming on the back of a bailout package by the government may have helped the telecom sector avert a crisis but the challenges haven't ceased to exist as the industry faces a cash-guzzling task of rolling out 5G networks in the coming months. The sector that provides direct and indirect employment to millions is projected to see Rs 1.3 lakh crore to Rs 2.3 lakh crore of investments in the coming years in creating robust infrastructure and building telecom and network products that have been incentivised by the government through PLI and other initiatives. After years of cut-throat competition and the apex court ruling on payment of past statutory dues left some players in the lurch, billionaire Sunil Mittal's Bharti Airtel and struggling Vodafone Idea almost in tandem raised tariffs, taking the plunge they had long been talking about.
Having reached the Red Planet, ISRO can now focus on getting humans in space and secure the resources to do it
Discussing the prospect of more reform earlier this month, telecom minister Ashwini Vaishnaw announced a delay in the 5G spectrum auction. India's telecom sector regulation has to be benchmarked with the global best, he said. It's another matter that many countries have either introduced or are about to roll out 5G services that will enable cutting-edge tech in diverse areas. For India, too, it will mean a lot for healthcare, robotics and unleashing a new chapter in Digital India perhaps.
Experts said India has possessed the anti-missile technology for several years but needed the political go-ahead to actually test it in live conditions.
The success of the PSLV-C34 mission is a result of ISRO's professionalism and the hard work put in by their scientists over the last many decades., says Ajay Lele.
'With the Balakot strike, India has now established a precedent for response to any new terrorist attack engineered by Pakistan.' 'This will stay irrespective of who wins the coming elections,' says Colonel Anil A Athale (retd).
Russia and the US are the major partners in the ISS programme, which also includes Canada, Japan and several European nations like France, Italy and Spain.
And the first Indian to go into space from 'Indian soil' could well be a woman.
China is all set to send on Thursday the first three crew members to its under-construction space station which is expected to be Beijing's eye in the sky and will rival the ageing International Space Station (ISS).
ISRO hopes to put a crew on the moon, but it has to learn how to keep people alive and healthy in space first.
The balloon, which was being used by the People's Republic of China in an attempt to surveil strategic sites in the continental United States, was brought down above US territorial waters.
In the test, a space rocket boosted a hypersonic glide vehicle, one capable of carrying a nuclear device, which circled the globe before impacting.
If successful, this would increase capacity to hurl small satellites into space, meeting both local demand and serving global customers.
NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft has snapped a series of images during its flyby on September 17 of Vikram's attempted landing sight near the Moon's uncharted south pole.
China on Tuesday alleged that US billionaire Elon Musk-owned SpaceX's satellites had two 'close encounters' with its space station in orbit, and has complained to the United Nations about the incidents which endangered the safety of the Chinese astronauts.
The Mars mission is overwhelmingly irrelevant to space science and won't advance the frontiers of knowledge. It will divert attention from the real technological challenges facing the Indian space programme, and will further distort our science and technology priorities, says Praful Bidwai.
The mission has been extended by another six months due to surplus fuel
The rover will carry out in-situ chemical analysis of the lunar surface during the course of its mobility.
The Announcement of Opportunity (AO) is for space experiments by institutions in the country, and the last date for receiving the proposals is May 19, 2017, the Bengaluru-headquartered ISRO said.
'ISRO is resilient enough to spring back and come with a solution quickly.'
The RISAT-2B would replace the RISAT-2, which has been actively used by India to monitor activities in camps across the border in Pakistan to thwart infiltration bids by terrorists.
'You don't want to harm the satellites of other countries, but you also don't want your own satellite to be harmed.'
Rediff.com takes a look at spacecraft that have successfully made it to Mars.
The precise location of the spacecraft in the lunar highlands has yet to be determined.
A meteor shower consists of particles left behind by comets, which are made up of dirty snow and ice.
A day after India successfully launched the Mars Orbiter in the Red Planet on its first attempt, it tweeted the first image it took and captioned it, 'the view is nice up here'.
