Heena Sharma Blog

  Lunar Eclipse 2020 : A lunar eclipse will take place today. This year, a total of four penumbral lunar eclipses were expected to take place, out of which the first lunar eclipse took place on January 10, the second on June 5 and the third on July 5. The fourth one will occur today. "A penumbral lunar eclipse takes place when the sun, earth, and moon align in almost a straight line. The earth blocks some of the sun's light from directly reaching the moon's surface, and partially covers the moon with the outer part of its shadow, also known as the penumbra," Rajendraprakash Gupt, superintendent of Jiwaji Observatory in Ujjain in Madhya Pradesh said. At what time will the lunar eclipse take place The 'penumbral lunar eclipse' will begin at 12:59:09 pm and continue till 05:25:09 pm today. Lunar Eclipse 2020: Which countries will witness it? The lunar eclipse will be seen in most of Europe, most of Asia, Australia, North America, South America, Pacific, ...

  As you drive down the road leading to Jodrell Bank Observatory , a sign asks visitors to turn off their mobile phones, stating that the Lovell telescope is so powerful it could detect a phone signal on Mars. Radio telescopes are designed to be incredibly sensitive. To quote the legendary astronomer Carl Sagan, “The total amount of energy from outside the solar system ever received by all the radio telescopes on the planet Earth is less than the energy of a single snowflake striking the ground.” The total energy now is probably a few snowflakes’ worth, but nevertheless it is still true that astronomical radio signals are typically magnitudes smaller than artificial ones. If Jodrell Bank could pick up interference from a phone signal on Mars, how would it fare with an entire 4G network on the Moon? That is the issue that is worrying astronomers like me, now that Nokia of America has been awarded US$14.1m (£10.8m) for the development of the first ever cellular network on the M...

The Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) on Wednesday successfully conducted final orbit raising manoeuvre of Chandrayaan-2 spacecraft. It was carried out at 02:21 am IST. With this, Chandrayaan-2 entered the Lunar Transfer Trajectory. During this maneuver, the spacecraft's liquid engine was fired for about 1203 seconds. Earlier, the spacecraft's orbit was progressively increased five times during July 23 to August 6, 2019. The health of the spacecraft is being continuously monitored from the Mission Operations Complex (MOX) at ISRO Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network (ISTRAC) in Bengaluru with support from Indian Deep Space Network (IDSN) antennas at Byalalu, near Bengaluru. Since its launch on July 22, 2019 by GSLV MkIII-M1 vehicle, all systems onboard Chandrayaan-2 spacecraft are performing normal, said Isro officials. Chandrayaan-2 will approach Moon on August 20, 2019 and the spacecraft's liquid engine will be fired again to insert the spacecra...

I still remember a cartoon in a newspaper in July 1969, just before the first Apollo moon landing. It showed the ground crew reminding the astronauts as they boarded their rocket, “Don’t forget to bring back some rock!” This was a nod to an old holiday cliché – people who went to the seaside were often asked to bring back some “rock”, referring to rock candy. It wasn’t very funny, but it does demonstrate that, once the race against the Soviets was won, the point of it all was to find out about the moon’s geology. The scientific value of landing on the moon would have been diminished without studies to establish the context of the landing sites. The primary consideration was to touch down somewhere safe, but rocks collected from these places would have conveyed much less information had effort not gone into working out the nature of, and more importantly the relationships between, the rock units from which the samples were collected. This was done by making detailed geological...

Our senses are stuck in the past . There’s a flash of lightning, and then seconds pass until we hear the rumble of distant thunder. We hear the past. We are seeing into the past too . While sound travels about a kilometre every three seconds, light travels 300,000 kilometres every second. When we see a flash of lighting three kilometres away, we are seeing something that happened a hundredth of a millisecond ago. That’s not exactly the distant past. But as we look further afield, we can peer further back. We can see seconds, minutes, hours and years into the past with our own eyes. Looking through a telescope, we can look even further into the past. A second back in time If you really want to look back in time, you need to look up. The Moon is our nearest celestial neighbour - a world with valleys, mountains and craters. Read More Business Standard