Science

During the Diwali festival on October 25, there will be a partial solar eclipse which will be visible from the city as well as from most parts of the country, astrophysicist Debi Prasad Duari said. The eastern metropolis, however, will be able to witness the partial solar eclipse, the second in 2022, for a very

The Union Minister for Science and Technology Jitendra Singh on Monday said the Indian startups would soon launch space satellites as well as satellite constellations and try their rockets. Speaking at the India Space Conclave here on the occasion of the first anniversary of the Indian Space Association, ISpA, Jitendra Singh said the “revolutionary and

The X-ray spectrometer ‘CLASS’ on the Chandrayaan-2 orbiter has mapped an abundance of sodium on the moon for the first time, according to the Indian Space Research Organisation. Chandrayaan-1 X-ray Fluorescence Spectrometer (C1XS) detected sodium from its characteristic line in X-rays which opened up the possibility of mapping the amount of sodium on the moon,

A new NASA-funded technology for future space missions may charge an electric car in just five minutes on Earth, paving the way for increased adoption of such vehicles, the US space agency said. Researchers at Purdue University, US developed the Flow Boiling and Condensation Experiment (FBCE) to enable two-phase fluid flow and heat transfer experiments

A four-member SpaceX Crew Dragon team, including a Russian cosmonaut and the first Native American woman sent to orbit, safely docked with the International Space Station (ISS) on Thursday and moved aboard to begin a five-month science mission. Rendezvous of the latest NASA expedition to the orbiting laboratory came just after 5 EDT (2:30am IST)

A SpaceX rocket soared into orbit from Florida on Wednesday carrying the next long-term International Space Station crew, with a Russian cosmonaut, two Americans and a Japanese astronaut flying together in a demonstration of US-Russian teamwork in space despite Ukraine war tensions. A high-ranking official of the Russian space agency Roscosmos said shortly after the

The United States will on Wednesday carry a Russian to the International Space Station aboard a SpaceX ship, in a voyage that carries symbolic significance amid the Ukraine war. Anna Kikina, the only female cosmonaut in service, is part of the Crew-5 mission, which also includes one Japanese and two American astronauts. Blast-off is set

Delhi Environment Minister Gopal Rai on Monday launched an advanced Green War Room to monitor air pollution 24X7 in the national capital and ensure effective implementation of winter action plan to curb it. This war room will work from the seventh floor of the Delhi Secretariat where a 12-member team comprising environment scientists and other

India’s Mars Orbiter craft has run out of propellant and its battery drained beyond the safe limit, fuelling speculation that the country’s maiden interplanetary mission ‘Mangalyaan’ may have finally completed its long innings. The Rs. 450 crore Mars Orbiter Mission was launched onboard PSLV-C25 on November 5, 2013, and the MOM spacecraft was successfully inserted

Meta has unveiled a new artificial intelligence system called ‘Make-A-Video’ that will allow users to generate short video clips by entering a text description of the desired scene. The announcement follows the company’s recent advancements in generative technology research, which seeks to give creators more creative control over artificially intelligent image generation. With the announcement,

NASA and SpaceX have agreed to study the feasibility of awarding Elon Musk’s company a contract to boost the Hubble Space Telescope to a higher orbit, with a goal of extending its lifespan, the US space agency said Thursday. The renowned observatory has been operating since 1990 about 335 miles (540 kilometers) above Earth, in

Astronomers have assembled the largest-ever compilation of high-precision galaxy distances, called Cosmicflows-4. Galaxies, such as the Milky Way, are the building blocks of the universe, each comprised of up to several hundred billion stars. Galaxies beyond our immediate neighborhood are rushing away, faster if they are more distant, which is a consequence of the expansion

In a world first, NASA has crashed a spacecraft into an asteroid in an attempt to push the rocky traveler off its trajectory. The Double Asteroid Redirection Test – or DART – is meant to test one potential approach that could prevent an asteroid from colliding with Earth. David Barnhart is a professor of astronautics

It will be “difficult” for NASA to make a new attempt to launch its massive Moon rocket in October, an official from the US space agency said Tuesday, with a lift-off in November looking more likely.  The SLS rocket, the most powerful ever designed by NASA, had to be returned overnight to its storage hangar

NASA’s mission to deflect asteroid is a step towards preparing the world for a potential future asteroid strike like the one which killed the dinosaurs some 66 million years ago, the chances of which are very slim in our lifetime, Indian scientists said. In a first-of-its-kind mission, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft successfully

Adani Group will invest $100 billion (roughly Rs. 8,14,200 crore) over the next decade, primarily in new energy and digital space that includes data centres, Chairman Gautam Adani said on Tuesday, as the group bets big on India growth story. As much as 70 percent of this investment will be in the energy transition space,

NASA’s DART spacecraft successfully slammed into a distant asteroid at hypersonic speed on Monday in the world’s first test of a planetary defense system, designed to prevent a potential doomsday meteorite collision with Earth. Humanity’s first attempt to alter the motion of an asteroid or any celestial body played out in a NASA webcast from

India’s Mars orbiter craft has completed eight years in its orbit, well beyond its designed mission life of six months. Plans on a follow-on ‘Mangalyaan’ mission to the Red Planet, however, are yet to be firmed up. The Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) – a technology demonstration venture – is the maiden interplanetary mission of the

Ten months after launch, NASA’s asteroid-deflecting DART spacecraft neared a planned impact with its target on Monday in a test of the world’s first planetary defense system, designed to prevent a doomsday collision with Earth. The cube-shaped “impactor” vehicle, roughly the size of a vending machine with two rectangular solar arrays, was on course to

The search for alien life just got more interesting as a team of scientists recently discovered new evidence suggesting that Saturn’s moon Enceladus has oceans that have all the basic requirements and materials needed for life to survive. According to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), researchers

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has deployed his satellite-based Starlink service in Iran amid widespread protests in the country following which authorities had restricted internet access. This Iranian government had cut off internet access for many of its citizens on Wednesday amid widespread protests over the death of a 22-year-old woman, Mahsa Amini, in police custody,

NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft is designed to be a one hit wonder. It will end its days by crashing into an asteroid at 24,000 kilometres per hour on September 26. Launched from Earth in November 2021, DART is about the size of a bus and was created to test and prove our

NASA’s historic uncrewed mission to the Moon is facing fresh difficulties. After technical problems derailed two launch attempts several weeks ago, a new liftoff of the Artemis 1 mission scheduled for Tuesday is now threatened by a storm gathering in the Caribbean. The storm, which has not yet been assigned a name, is currently located

Specks of dust retrieved by a Japanese space probe from an asteroid some 300 million kilometres from Earth have revealed a surprising component: a drop of water, scientists said Friday. The discovery offers new support for the theory that life on Earth was seeded from outer space. The findings are in the latest research to

Astronomers said Thursday they have spotted a hot bubble of gas spinning clockwise around the black hole at the centre of our galaxy at “mind blowing” speeds. The detection of the bubble, which only survived for a few hours, is hoped to provide insight into how these invisible, insatiable, galactic monsters work. The supermassive black

The James Webb Space Telescope has captured its first image of Neptune, revealing the clearest view of the distant planet’s rings in more than 30 years, NASA said. The most striking feature in the image is the crisp view of the planet’s rings — some of which have not been detected since NASA’s Voyager 2

The European Space Agency announced a team of seven astronauts on Wednesday to train for NASA’s Artemis mission to the moon — but only one will have the chance to become the first European to walk on the lunar surface. The candidates — France’s Thomas Pesquet, Britain’s Tim Peake, Germany’s Alexander Gerst and Matthias Maurer, Italy’s

NASA said Wednesday it had successfully trialed the fuelling process for its new rocket, after technical issues a few weeks ago halted two attempts to get the behemoth off the ground and headed towards the Moon. “All of the objectives that we set out to do we were able to accomplish today,” said Charlie Blackwell-Thompson,

SpaceX will apply for an exemption from US sanctions against Iran in a bid to offer its satellite internet service to the country, owner Elon Musk said on Monday. “Starlink will apply for an exemption from sanctions against Iran,” Musk said in response to a tweet from a science reporter. Musk had initially announced that

A US astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts are set to blast off to the International Space Station Wednesday on a Russian-operated flight despite soaring tensions between Moscow and Washington over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. NASA’s Frank Rubio and Russia’s Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin are scheduled to take off from the Russia-leased Baikonur cosmodrome in

Mars, by virtue of its tenuous atmosphere and proximity to our solar system’s asteroid belt, is far more vulnerable than Earth to being struck by space rocks – one of the many differences between the two planetary neighbours. Scientists are now gaining a fuller understanding of this Martian trait, with help from NASA’s robotic InSight

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, known for capturing some incredible images of the universe, has presented us with new pictures of our neighbouring planet, Mars. The telescope captured its first images and spectra of Mars on September 5. The James Webb Space Telescope, an international collaboration between NASA, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian

A team of scientists has announced a surprising discovery – that they were able to create matter out of nothing. The experiment was carried out in January 2022, in which strong electric fields were created in a simple laboratory leveraging the unique properties of grapheme, which enabled the creation of particle-antiparticle pair from nothing at