Sirisha Bandla, the Second Indian-origin Woman to Fly to Space
Sirisha Bandla will soon become the second India-born woman to fly to space. The first Indian-origin woman to achieve the feat was Kalpana Chawla. After she embarks on her journey on July 11, Bandla would be the fourth Indian to fly into space.
Bandla is vice-president, government affairs and research operations wing of Virgin Galactic as well as its sister concern, Virgin Orbit.
During the space flight, which is the 22nd for VSS Unity, Sirisha's role will be to evaluate research experience.
Jul 02, 2021
SpaceX Launches 88 Satellites as Part of 'Ride-share' Mission
Tech billionaire Elon Musk's space company Spacex has launched 88 satellites, as part of the firm's second in-house "ride-share" mission from Florida, bringing the total number of orbital objects this year to nearly 900.
The company launched the satellites on a reused Falcon 9 rocket for the "Transporter-2" mission, including the first five for a new Pentagon agency and dozens more for various companies, countries and schools.
Jul 01, 2021
Scientists Catch 1st Glimpse of a Black Hole Swallowing a Neutron Star
After more than four years of exploring a menagerie of cosmic happenings through gravitational waves, scientists have finally spotted the third expected variety of collision, twice.
The new flavor of collision includes one black hole and one neutron star, making it a mash-up of sorts. Scientists have observed dozens of mergers of pairs of black holes, and a couple mergers of pairs of neutron stars, the superdense stellar corpses. But a crash between a black hole and neutron star, while predicted by scientists, had not been definitively detected.
Now, researchers say they have done just that, observing the unique ripples in space-time caused by such a collision.
"With this new discovery of neutron star-black hole mergers outside our galaxy, we have found the missing type of binary," Astrid Lamberts said in a statement. "We can finally begin to understand how many of these systems exist, how often they merge, and why we have not yet seen examples in the Milky Way."
Inflated Hot Jupiter Found Orbiting TOI-1789
Astronomers using NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) have discovered a transiting hot-Jupiter exoplanet around a slightly evolved star called TOI-1789.
Hot Jupiters have set several firsts, from being the first kind of exoplanets discovered with the radial velocity method (51 Peg), to being also the first kind of transiting systems studied for precise radii and orbits (HD 209458b)," said Akanksha Khandelwal, an astronomer at the Indian Institute of Techonology and the Physical Research Laboratory, and colleagues.
"These systems have intrigued the theorists triggering a critical revision of planet formation theories."
TOI-1789 is a slightly evolved, metal-rich, and late F-type star located 729 light-years away in the constellation of Leo.
Jun 30, 2021
L&T Technology Services Partners Mavenir for Open RAN, 5G Automation
L&T Technology Services Limited, a global leading pure-play engineering services company, announced a strategic partnership to deliver end-to-end 5G automation services with Mavenir, the Network Software Provider building the future of networks with cloud-native software that runs on any cloud.
The automation services will include Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) automation of the 5G ORAN portfolio of RU/DU/CU products, in conjunction with the Cloud Native 5G NSA and SA core network products, for global frequency bands supporting TDD and FDD technology.
Jun 28, 2021
India to Allow Private Players to Build and Operate Rocket Launch Sites
India has decided to allow private companies to establish and operate rocket launch sites within and outside the country, subject to prior authorisation from the government.
Similarly, any rocket launch (orbital or sub-orbital) from Indian or overseas territory can be carried out only with authorisation from Indian National Space Promotion & Authorization Center (IN-SPACe), an independent body constituted by the Government of India, under the Department of Space (DOS).
The launch could be from own or leased launch site and also from mobile platforms (land, sea or air) as per the Draft National Space Transportation Policy-2020 brought out by the Department of Space.
The Draft National Space Transportation Policy-2020 is comprehensive covering all aspects of rocket launching, launchpads, reentry of a space object and others.
Astronomers Discover a Massive Star Cluster in the Constellation Scutum
An international team of astrophysicists led by the Stellar Astrophysics Group of the University of Alicante (UA), the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), and the University of Valparaíso (Chile) has discovered a massive cluster of stars of intermediate age in the direction of the Scutum constellation. This object, which has been named Valparaíso 1, lies some seven thousand light years away from the sun, and contains at least fifteen thousand stars. To detect it, observations have been combined from ESA's Gaia satellite, and various ground-based telescopes, including the Isaac Newton Telescope at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (Garafía, La Palma, Canary Islands).
Open clusters are groups of stars that were born together, and move together, bound by gravity. This makes them natural laboratories for studying the physics and the lives of stars. The more stars there are in a cluster, the more useful it is, because the larger sample gives a better chance to find stars in less frequent evolutionary phases.
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