AlphaRocketry

English Tamil In a milestone in the development of space astronomy in India, the Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA) has built the Visible Emission Line Coronagraph (VELC), the largest payload that would fly on Aditya L1, the country's first dedicated scientific mission to study the Sun. It is expected to be launched by Indian Space Research Organisation by middle of this year.  The VELC payload has formally handed over to ISRO Chairman S Somanath at IIA's CREST campus on Thursday.  There are other six payloads: Solar Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope, Aditya Solar Wind Particle Experiment, Plasma Analyser Package for Aditya, Solar Low Energy X-ray Spectrometer, High Energy L1 Orbiting X-ray Spectrometer, and Magnetometer.  சூரியனை ஆய்வு செய்வதற்கான பயணத்தில் மிகப்பெரிய பேலோட் இஸ்ரோவிடம் ஒப்படைக்கப்பட்டது   இந்தியாவில் விண்வெளி வானியல் வளர்ச்சியில் ஒரு மைல்கல்லாக, இந்தியன் இன்ஸ்டிடியூட் ஆப் ஆஸ்ட்ரோபிசிக்ஸ் (IIA) விசிபிள் எமிஷன் லைன் கரோனாகிராஃப் (...

 ISRO said its lead rocket development facility, the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC) facilitated the hot testing of a Rocket Engine developed by an Indian Start-up on November 4. VSSC successfully conducted the 15 second hot test of Agnilet Engine for Agnikul Cosmos Pvt Ltd on November at its Vertical Test Facility, Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station (TERLS), Thiruvananthapuram. The test was carried out as a part of an MOU signed betwenn ISRO and Chennai based Agnikul to povdie opportunity for Indian Space Startups to use ISRO facilitites through InSpace. "Agnilet is a regeneratively cooled 1.4 kN semi-cryogenic Engine, working at a chamber pressure of 10.8 bar(a) using Liquid oxygen and Aviation Turbing Fuel (ATF) as propellants.  This Engine is realised through state of art 3D printing Technology and material of construction is INCONEL-718" Agnikul Cosmos sadi: "Humbled to announce that we successfully test fired one version of out patented technology based...

India’s first privately developed rocket — Vikram-S is undergoing final launch preparations at ISRO launchpad in Sriharikota and is expected to be launched in a suborbital mission later this week. The mission is named ‘Prarambh’ — meaning ‘the beginning’. The rocket is developed by Skyroot Aerospace, which has the technical launch clearance from InSpace and is looking at a launch window between November 12 and 16. “A launch window between November 12 and 16 has been notified by authorities, the final date being confirmed based on weather conditions. With this maiden mission, we’re set to become the first private space company in India to launch a rocket into space heralding a new era for the space sector which was recently opened up to facilitate private sector participation,” the Hyderabad-headquartered company said. Skyroot, incidentally, was the first Indian startup to sign an MoU with Isro in this regard. “We could build and get Vikram-S mission-ready in such a short t...

The first abort test using the special test vehicle (TV) part of #Gaganyaan, which was earlier targeted for the last quarter of this calendar year, is now expected only in early 2023. ISRO chairman S Somanath told: “There’s been a lot of progress & at this juncture we're looking at the first test in early 2023. The test vehicle is already at SHAR (spaceport in Sriharikota) and work on the crew module (CM) and crew escape system (CES) is progressing. As reported earlier, the test — TV technology demonstrator-1 (TV-TD1) mission — will demonstrate the descent phase, parachute deployment and recovery, among other things. While there will be more than one TV-TDs, in the first one, the CM will separate from the TV at a height of around 11km (from sea level), attain an altitude of around 15km before falling back to back in the Bay of Bengal. The Sriharikota ground team will track. Once separated or ejected from TV, CM will have a free fall. Essentially, will demonstrate crew e...

  It's time to modernize the fight against space junk, U.S. regulators say. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is pledging to update the rules it enacted just two years ago to address space debris, with a new focus on in-space servicing assembly and manufacturing (ISAM) risks and opportunities. "We believe the new space age needs new rules," FCC chair Jessica Rosenworcel said in an Aug. 5 statement. Existing regulations, she added, were generally "designed for a time when going to space was astronomically expensive and limited to the prowess of our political superpowers." Rosenworcel pointed out that megaconstellations and crowdfunded satellites were not possible in the 1950s when space exploration first began. That said, the new push piggybacks off a similar space debris effort that the FCC publicized much more recently, in 2020(opens in That 2020 update was said to be the most comprehensive revision to space debris rules in more than 15 years,...

  The campaign to bring pristine Martian samples to Earth will now include two mini helicopters. Artist's illustration of the vehicles that will participate in the Mars sample return campaign organized by NASA and the European Space Agency.   (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech) NASA officials involved with the Mars sample return (MSR) effort announced yesterday (July 27) that they plan to redesign the mission, abandoning a previous concept that called for a European Space Agency (ESA) "fetch rover" that would touch down on its own lander. NASA's Perseverance rover, expected to still be active when a NASA MSR lander touches down in 2031, will now be tasked with bringing the samples it is collecting and caching to a Mars ascent vehicle. Failing that, however, two helicopters much like Ingenuity, which landed with Perseverance last year, will be backup options to pick up the caches themselves. The helicopters will be similar to Ingenuity in terms of size and ma...

A fresh image based on brand-new deep-space data appears to show a wormhole spinning before our very eyes. The appropriately named "Phantom Galaxy" glows eerily in a new image by Judy Schmidt based on James Webb Space Telescope data collected nearly a million miles away from our planet using the observatory's mid-infrared instrument (MIRI). "I've been doing this for 10 years now, and [Webb] data is new, different, and exciting," Schmidt told Space.com. "Of course I'm going to make something with it." The image highlights the dust lanes in the galaxy, which is more properly known as NGC 628 or Messier 74. Dubbed the "perfect spiral" by some astronomers because the galaxy is so symmetrical, the Phantom Galaxy is scientifically interesting because of the intermediate-mass black hole scientists believe is embedded at its heart. The image highlights the dust lanes in the galaxy, which is more properly known as NGC 628 or Messie...

NASA announced Thursday (July 21) it will task a team led by Draper to carry a suite of science and technology payloads to Schrödinger Crater(opens in new tab), an impact basin on the moon's far side. Touchdown of the Draper SERIES-2 lander is scheduled for 2025. The $73 million Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) contract, if successfully executed, will represent the first time NASA science has touched down on the far side of the moon. (This is the eighth CLPS contract announced so far and also, the first CLPS mission to target the far side.) An illustration of Draper’s SERIES-2 lunar lander, scheduled to send science and technology payloads to the moon for NASA in 2025.   (Image credit: Draper) Only one country has successfully completed a mission on the moon's far side, and relatively recently: China's Chang'e k4 lander carrying the Yutu 2 rover arrived in Von Kármán Crater on Jan. 2, 2019. Complexities in landing on the far side of...

Space tech startup Agnikul Cosmos today inaugurated India's first-ever facility to manufacture 3D-printed rocket engines in Chennai. Named Rocket Factory 1, it was unveiled by Tata Sons chairman N Chandrasekaran and Isro chairman S Somanath in the presence of Pawan Goenka, the chairman of IN-SPACe (Indian National Space Promotion and Authorization Centre). The 10,000-square-foot facility is located at IIT-Madras Research Park. It will have a 400mm x 400mm x 400mm metal 3D-printer from  EOS that will enable end-to-end manufacturing of a rocket engine under one roof. The manufacturing facility has a capacity to make two rocket engines per week and thereby one launch vehicle every month, Agnikul co-founder Srinath Ravichandran told TOI. "This s a milestone for us as we go from R&D phase into core manufacturing with the opening of this facility, and begin productionizing the launch vehicle engine making. We have a lot of inbound interest [for launches] from global quarters...

  There is a layer of Earth's atmosphere that scientists know very little about. Dubbed the "ignorosphere," this layer at the edge of space plays a huge role in determining the intensity of space weather events.  A new space mission is in the works that will attempt to shed more light on the processes that take place there, but it won't be ready before the current solar cycle ends.  When bursts of charged particles from the sun that form the solar wind hit Earth, strange things happen in the planet's gaseous coat. Those heavy particles (protons, electrons and heavy ions) collide with atoms in the upper atmosphere, energizing them, Juha Pekka Luntama, the head of space weather at the European Space Agency (ESA), told. Most of this energy exchange happens in the thermosphere, the second-highest layer of Earth's atmosphere that extends between altitudes of 60 miles to 360 miles (100 to 600 kilometers). The excess energy warms up ...

NASA's Artemis 1 moon mission completed a crucial preflight milestone today (June 20), wrapping up a two-day set of tests known as a wet dress rehearsal.  Those tests included fueling up Artemis 1's huge Space Lakunch System (SLS) rocket and performing a simulated countdown that took the vehicle and NASA's Orion capsule through most of the progressions they would endure on launch day before engine ignition. The simulated countdown reached its conclusion at 7:37 p.m. EDT (2337 GMT), bringing an end to the wet dress. Not everything went perfectly smoothly. The Artemis 1 team noticed a hydrogen leak during fueling today, and they intentionally "masked" data associated with the issue to let the countdown continue. (During an actual launch countdown, such data would have raised red flags, NASA officials said.) This change meant the countdown was halted at T-29 seconds before "liftoff," instead of T-9 seconds as originally planned. But that hiccup didn...

The Indian space agency is literally growing new wings as it gets ready to test a scaled down version of what can easily be described as the `swadeshi Space Shuttle'. The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) calls it the `Reusable Launch Vehicle' or RLV. If all goes to plan very soon it will be seen flying over the Science City in Challakere, Karnataka, where the first landing experiment is being planned. S Somanath, Chairman, ISRO says "We are working silently on reusable rocket technology, with a very low budget, low cost and low investment." In the past USA and Russia have flown full-fledged winged space vehicles. Russia/USSR flew its vehicle called `Buran' only once in 1988 and the program was then shelved. USA made 135 flights of the Space Shuttle and in 2011 it was retired. Since then in a new burst of energy, USA, China and India are the only countries having an active program of re-useable rocket development. If all goes as per plan India's full...

With the cost of launching a rocket into space falling, the number of rocket launches is, well, taking off. Last year, governments and companies across the world successfully launched 133 rockets into orbit, breaking a record that stood for 45 years. But there's a catch. Breaking free from Earth's gravity requires a rocket to release a tremendous amount of energy in a short period of time. As a rocket leaves Earth, it produces hot exhaust that changes the physics and chemistry of the atmosphere as it passes through. In a paper published Tuesday in the peer-reviewed journal Physics of Fluids, a pair of physicists simulated the launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket blasting into space. They found several reasons to be concerned. The carbon footprint isn't the problem  Rockets aren't responsible for putting that much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. A typical launch burns roughly the same amount of fuel as a day-long commercial flight but produc...

our Instagram page Multiple star systems are very common in the Milky Way. While most of these systems are binary systems consisting of two stars, others contain three, four, or even six stars. These systems tend to be pretty stable since unstable systems tend to break apart or merge fairly quickly, but sometimes you can get a kind of meta-stable system. One that lasts long enough for stars to evolve while still being stable in the end. And that end could be a supernova. It all comes down to gravitational dynamics. In Newtonian physics, two orbiting masses in isolation are always stable. The only paths they can have are elliptical orbits. This is why simple binaries are the most common multiple star systems. Once you have three or more masses, things get more complicated. So complicated that there isn’t an exact solution to the three-body problem, much less four or more. Fortunately, we can make highly accurate orbital models. So while we don’t have an exact solution for multiple star ...

A form of dark energy may cause the accelerating expansion of the universe to come to an end Scientists have developed a new model of the universe which suggests its currently observed accelerated expansion could end as early as 100 million years from now, after which it would transition to a phase of contraction. Researchers, including Paul Steinhardt from Princeton University in New Jersey, say all this may happen “remarkably” quickly, sooner than thought before “Going back in time 65 million years, that’s when the Chicxulub asteroid hit the Earth and eliminated the dinosaurs. On a cosmic scale, 65 million years is remarkably short,” Steinhardt told Live Science. The study, published last month in the journal PNAS, has noted that a form of dark energy (quintessence) could cause the accelerating expansion of the universe to come to an end. Following this change, they say there would be a smooth transition from expansion to a phase of slow contraction. Several studies since...

  The FAA has repeatedly pushed back the estimated release date of the final report. We'll have to wait at least another month to see the results of the U.S Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) environmental review of SpaceX's Starship program. The FAA has been working for months on that review — officially known as a programmatic environmental assessment (PEA) — which is assessing the environmental impacts of Starbase, the South Texas site where SpaceX has been building and testing its huge Starship vehicle.  The agency published a draft PEA in September and estimated that the final version would be wrapped up by the end of the year. But the FAA has repeatedly delayed the final PEA, generally by a month at a time, citing the need to analyze the public comments submitted in response to the draft report and discuss next steps with other government agencies Late last month, the FAA told us that it expected to release the final PEA today (...

SpaceX just secured its first deal to provide inflight internet service on airplanes using its Starlink constellation of broadband satellites. The service will be available later this year to customers of JSX, a charter airline company that plans to equip 100 planes with Starlink-provided inflight Wi-Fi. "The service will be offered to all JSX customers at no charge, and will not require logging in or other complexities associated with legacy systems," JSX representatives said in an emailed statement on Thursday (April 21) that announced the new deal. A JSX spokesperson declined to disclose the value of the contract when asked by Reuters. SpaceX has been in discussions with several airlines in recent months, the Reuters report added Delta Airlines told the Wall Street Journal, however, that it recently conducted "exploratory tests" of Starlink's internet technology in a bid to potentially reach business users., but it's unclear who else might be willing to t...

NASA announced April 20 the Communications Services Project (CSP) awards, totaling $278.5 million, to test how commercial satellites in both low Earth orbit and geostationary orbit could support missions that currently use the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS) constellation of NASA-owned spacecraft that have provided service since the 1980s. Two of the winners, Amazon’s Kuiper Government Solutions and SpaceX, won $67 million and $69.95 million respectively to demonstrate how their LEO constellations, using optical links, can provide communications services for satellites and launches. Inmarsat Government Inc. and Viasat won $28.6 million and $53.3 million respectively to demonstrate services using GEO satellites. SES Government Solutions and Telesat U.S. Services won $28.96 million and $30.65 million respectively to demonstrate services using a mix of GEO satellites and constellations in LEO and medium Earth orbits. The awards are in the form of Space Act Agreements with the c...

Redshift and blueshift are used by astronomers to work out how far an object is from Earth. Redshift and blueshift describe the change in the frequency of a light wave depending on whether an object is moving towards or away from us. When an object is moving away from us, the light from the object is known as redshift, and when an object is moving towards us, the light from the object is known as blueshift.  Astronomers use redshift and blueshift to deduce how far an object is away from Earth, the concept is key to charting the universe's expansion.  To understand redshift and blueshift, first, you need to remember that visible light is a spectrum of color each with a different wavelength. According to NASA, violet has the shortest wavelength at around 380 nanometers, and red has the longest at around 700 nanometers. When an object (e.g. a galaxy) moves away from us it is 'red-shifted' as the wavelength of light is 'stretched' so the light is seen as ...

Scientists have for the first time determined the mass of W bosons, which are responsible for the nuclear processes that make the Sun shine. They have found them to have more mass than what was theorised. After working on it for a decade, conducting careful analysis and scrutiny, physicists at the Fermilab Collider Detector (CDF) have come across a new observation, that, if confirmed could have a tectonic shift in the world of physics. They have found a fundamental particle to have more mass (weight) than what was initially thought. This subatomic particle, known as the W boson, is responsible for a fundamental force at the center of atoms, and they exist for only a fraction of a second before they decay into other particles. These particles have been used to explain the workings of the universe, and a new observation of them having a different mass could have a major impact on the equations that govern the workings of our world. Scientists have for the first time determined the mass o...