SCIENCE AND SOCIETY

                THOUGHT FOR A HOT SUMMER           The hot summer days are unceremoniously back!  With the daytime temperatures inching to 40 0 C so early in the season, the current season promises to be painfully hot. Gone are the days when the summer in our childhood village days was so pleasant and soothing.  The cool refreshing southerly breezes of the evening, the cuckoo’s melodious song in the meadows, cricket’s tune reverberating the quiet afternoons, the smell of mango buds swept away by the winds and people enjoying playing cards under moon-lit sky till late night - all revive the sweet memories of the ancient village life. So what has gone wrong these days?     Scientists are attributing this unusual situation to a relatively recently known phenomenon called Global Warming which is emerging as perhaps the greatest environmental challenge of the twenty-first century.  Around 1980, scientists discovered a tantalizing phenomenon that the mean global temperature of the Earth

                                            HUNTING FOR EARTH-LIKE PLANETS (This article was published in 2009 and was written in the context of the launching of the Kepler Space Telescope by NASA to search for planets of different star systems in their habitable zones.)                                                                                                                               Nikunja Bihari Sahu        Are we alone in this vast universe? Is our planet the only one of its kind? Does life exist in other worlds? These are some o the questions which have puzzled mankind for ages. NASA’s Kepler telescope promises mankind answers to some of these questions.  The mission is a  space telescope, which using a Photometer developed by NASA, will examine over 1,00,000 stars in the deepest part of our Universe during its lifetime for earth-like planets that orbit around sun-like stars in their warm habitable zones where liquid water essential for life could be found. The Kepler

                                                                      LIFE ON THE RED PLANET   ( Written in 2012 in the context of the landing of NASA’s Curiosity rover on Mars)     Nikunja Bihari Sahu      Scientists have long speculated about the possibility of life on Mars owing to its striking similarity to our Earth. Fictional Martians have been a recurring feature of popular entertainment shows of the 20th and 21st centuries, but it remains an open question whether life currently exists on Mars, or has existed there in the past. The recent findings of the NASA rover Curiosity have taken us one step closer to answering this ever-elusive question.    Our craze for Mars was probably first aroused in the year 1866 when an Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli observed certain criss-crossed lines on Mars with his telescope.  These were, however, later found to be sheer optical illusions. An American astronomer Perceval Lowell built an observatory exclusively dedicated to the stud

ISRO’S SPACE AMBITIONS    Nikunja Bihari Sahu              After shooting down a decommissioned weather satellite with its ASAT rocket under the programme Mission Shakti, ISRO successfully launched a military satellite EMISAT along with 28 foreign satellites in its own launch vehicle PSLV C45, a new variant of PSLV with four strap-on motors . While the former demonstrated its ability to shoot down any moving hostile object in space to safeguard its outer space limits and the space assets deployed there, the latter clearly showed its capability to launch multiple satellites from a single launch system. Two years ago, ISRO also successfully launched 104 satellites by a single rocket including 101 foreign satellites to create a new milestone in space history. ISRO also made its intention clear last year to undertake the greatest feat in space exploration which is to launch a human into space in its ambitious Gaganayaan mission by the year 2022.   ISRO plans to launch a string of other

  COMETS: THE TRAVELLERS AND MESSENGERS OF SPACE Nikunja Bihari Sahu  T ucked away in the far fringes of our Solar System and beyond the orbit of Pluto, stretches out into interstellar space a great void world. Known as the Oort cloud, this is a rather quiet eventless place at the edge of our Solar System. From here, a bright yellow star, the Sun, can easily be seen. The Sun never appears to be the brightest amongst all the stars seen from this eerie and uncanny place. Rather, stars like Sirius and Canopus appear to be brighter. Attached to the weak gravity of the Sun, exists a band of space rocks since several million years that slowly go around the Sun in their quite desolate world at no more than an aircraft’s speed.                       Due to the irregular motion of the stars around the centre of our Milkyway galaxy, occasionally some stars come closer to these rocks and tug them a little with their gravity. This force is sufficient for some of these bodies to slip away from