Tag: Moon

How a Tiny Bit of Indian Soil Might Have Found Its Way to the Moon

Source: thewire.in

New Delhi: Even before India’s much-touted lunar missing, Chandrayaan-2, lands on the moon, a very small biological sample from the country may already be there.

According to The Hindu, this is because the only likely surviving payload onboard the Israeli lunar lander Beresheet, called the Lunar Library, contained a leaf and some soil from the Bodhi tree in Bihar.

Beresheet, whose name is Hebrew for the biblical phrase ‘In the beginning’, was launched on February 21 on board a SpaceX rocket. On April 11, it crash landed on the moon after a series of technical failures during its final descent. It was reported then that the Lunar Library, created by the Arch Mission Foundation (AMF), was likely the only payload that wasn’t destroyed in the crash.

But what is this Lunar Library, and why was it carrying Indian soil?

The Library, according to the AMF, “contains a 30 million page archive of human history and civilisation, covering all subjects, cultures, nations, languages, genres, and time periods”. It’s meant to be a “backup” of life on Earth, in case of human extinction.

It “is housed within a 100 gram nanotechnology device that resembles a 120mm DVD. However it is actually composed of 25 nickel discs, each only 40 microns thick,” AMF says.

Nova Spivack, co-founder of the AMF, told The Hindu in an email that a small sample from the Bodhi tree, along with material on learning Hindi, Urdu and information on music, were a part of the Lunar Library. He said:

“The management of Mahabodhi stupa (Bihar) privately gave me a leaf from the Bodhi tree and some soil from under the Bodhi seat. These were included. We mixed these with relics from saints and yogis, as well as earth from sacred caves and tiny bits of relics from India, China, Bhutan, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam, Nepal and Tibet.”

This isn’t the startling revelation Spivack has made about what the Lunar Library contains. Last week, he revealed that thousands of tardigrades – microscopic creatures commonly known as “water bears” – are also a part of this backup. Tardigrades are known to be some of the most resilient creatures on Earth. As The Wire has reported before, they have been known to come back to life even after being exposed to radiation in space and being frozen for several years.

On the AMF website, the organisation had earlier revealed the some of the contents of four analogue layers and 21 “layers of 40 micron thick nickel foils, each containing a DVD master”. This included private archives on culture and music, thousands of PDFs of books, linguistic datasets and more.

Even then, though, the foundation had made it clear that there was more than it was saying. “But this is only the beginning of the story – there is in fact much more in the Lunar Library. This will be revealed in coming months and years,” it said.

23-year-old is Chandrayaan-2’s Jharkhand connection

Source: telegraphindia.com

he Rs 978-crore Chandrayaan-2 mission to the Moon, which was successfully launched onboard the GSLV-MkIII-M1 rocket from the spaceport in Sriharikota, Andhra Pradesh, on Monday, has a Jharkhand connection.

Ranchi boy Gaurav Vaibhav, 23, who passed his 12th from Jawahar Vindya Mandir Shyamali in 2011, is a flight dynamics scientist for the mission, which is intended to help India become the fourth country to soft-land a spacecraft on the Moon after the former Soviet Union and the US in 1966 and China in 2014.

Gaurav has been working with the Indian Space Research Organisation’s (Isro’s) satellite centre in Bangalore since 2015 after completing his BTech in aerospace engineering from the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology in Kerala.

“Chandrayaan-2 is very important to me as it is my first interplanetary mission experience,” Gaurav told The Telegraph on Monday. “I learnt a lot, and felt the heat of being part of this historic mission. Being a flight dynamics scientist, I am involved in designing and planning of events to make the lander achieve the required landing site on the Moon. This kind of work requires a lot of numerical computations and analysis.”

Chandrayaan-2, made up of an orbiter and a lander with a rover, is expected to throw more light on the Moon. The Chandrayaan-1 orbiter, Isro had earlier said, had “conclusively discovered traces of water” on the Moon. The first mission had also discovered water ice in the Moon’s north polar region.

Gaurav has been part of the Chandrayaan-2 mission for the last one-and-half years.

“Within this timeframe, I had carried out the lander trajectory analysis and successfully completed the allotted activities,” he said.

Asked if anyone else from Jharkhand is part of the mission, Gaurav said: “Since many centres of Isro are involved, there could be (other) people from Jharkhand or Ranchi also but I would not know.”

He said there were lows, of at times stumbling on a problem, and highs — of achieving the solution.

“It has been really a fabulous learning experience for me. There were many challenges. Being the maiden lunar landing mission of India, soft landing on the required site is critical. All the subsystems are expected to perform; even one small system failure may lead to crash-landing. Since this landing phase will be of roughly just 20 minutes, recovery of any failure within that time isn’t possible,” he said. “Working together with so many subsystems in an integrated manner strengthened me technically from every aspect.”

Asked why the mission’s July 15 launch was cancelled, Gaurav said: “Cryogenic filling in the launch vehicle is done just four hours before the launch because it is highly inflammable.

On July 14, the required pressure could not develop during cryogenic filling because of an unexpected gap in a valve. Hence the mission was postponed till the problem was rectified. Fortunately it was observed at the right time and a major catastrophe was averted.”

Gaurav’s father Sudhir Upadhyay, under secretary in the state home department, who lives in Harmu Housing Colony, said he was proud of his son for being a part of the historic mission.