The Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) will launch Chandrayaan-I, India's maiden mission to the moon, in September.
In an interview on the sidelights of a seminar here on Thursday, the chairman of Isro, Mr G. Madhavan Nair, said that the final tests have been on to launch the spacecraft to moon.
The Chandrayaan-I will be launched atop a Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV), India's workhorse rocket with a streak of nine consecutive flawless missions.
London: The London Eye gives you a bird's eye-view of the city at 440 feet. How would you like to go higher, say, 440,000 feet? A prototype of the craft you would ride for such a space venture was unveiled in Salford on Tuesday. Rocket maker, Steve Bennett, says it is possible in the very near future for tourists to take a ride in outer space.
Is the white stuff in the Martian soil ice or salt? That's the question bedeviling scientists in the three weeks since the Phoenix lander began digging into Mars' north pole region to study whether the arctic could be habitable.
Shallow trenches excavated by the lander's backhoe-like robotic arm have turned up specks and at times even stripes of mysterious white material mixed in with the clumpy, reddish dirt.
Paris: European and US scientists will bid a fond farewell on July 1 to the space probe Ulysses, which has circled the Sun gathering data for 17 years, almost four times its expected lifetime. The first major collaboration between Nasa and the European Space Agency (ESA), launched in 1990, "changed forever the way we view the Sun and its effect on the surrounding space,' David Southwood, ESA's director of science, said in announcing the end of mission. Stuffed with 10 observational instruments, the 370-kg probe is the only satellite to have circled the Sun's poles.
Cape Canaveral (Florida): With astronauts hustling inside and out, the international space station got its biggest live-in addition yet, a Japanese lab stretching 37 feet that opens for business on Wednesday. Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide had the honor of installing the billion-dollar lab, named Kibo, which means "hope', just as two crewmates were winding up a spacewalk on Tuesday. He used the space station's robot arm to nudge the bus-size lab into place.
infoholic Yup, I can dig into frozen ground as hard as concrete. The scoop has special blades and a powered "rasp' to scrape ice. Cool! Whoever thought a Nasa spacecraft could be so adept at social networking and internet? For users of Twitter, a web microblogging service, the Phoenix Mars lander has been sending pithy news "tweets' to the cellphones and computers of interested "followers.' As of Friday night, the Phoenix lander had 9,636 followers at Twitter. According to twitterholic.com, it ranks No. 30 among all Twitter feeds in the solar system.
