SpaceX and NASA are gearing up to launch astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) as part of the Commercial Crew Program of NASA. This will be the fourth crew rotation mission and will be carrying an international crew consisting of four astronauts on a science expedition to the ISS.
This mission would be launched on 20th April from NASA's Kennedy Space Center's Launch Complex 39A.
The Kennedy Space Center is located in Florida.
The crew that would be sent aboard the ISS would be spending several months conducting various maintenance and science aboard the orbiting space station.
The astronauts would be returning to Earth in the fall of 2022.
The crew would be riding on a new Crew Dragon spacecraft and would be launched on a Falcon 9 booster.
As a tradition of naming a new capsule by the first riding astronauts, the crew chose the name "Freedom" to celebrate the fundamental human right.
The crew consists of NASA astronauts Bob Hines, Kjell Lindgren, and Jessica Watkins, along with Samantha Cristoforetti of the European Space Agency. The commander of the Crew-4 mission and the Crew Dragon spacecraft is Lindgren.
Apr 04, 2022
Leh to Sign Tripartite Agreement to Develop Hanley as Dark Sky Sanctuary
Leh Administration will sign a tripartite agreement to develop Hanley as Dark Sky Sanctuary and Leh Hill Council, WildLife and Tourism departments wouldjointly develop the area for Astrotourism.
The State WildLife Development board has increased the frequency of meetings for early clearances of various projects and compensation fee is increased and the wildlife agencies are instructed to release compensation within 15 days, in case wild animals cause injuries to domesticated cattle.
Spacetech Start-up Pixxel Launches 'Shakuntala' Satellite with Elon Musk's SpaceX
A SpaceX rocket carried a low-orbit imaging satellite built by Bengaluru-headquartered startup Pixxel into space, a first for the company to place a slew of satellites in space to track earth phenomena, particularly climate change. Weighing under 15 kg, the satellite can pack 10 m in a pixel, exceeding by a third the specificity of comparable launches by ISRO, NASA, and others, said Pixxel.
The satellite can beam down data relating to deforestation, melting of ice caps, gas leakage, crop health and other data critical for climate change assessments.
Apr 03, 2022
Hubble Spots most Distant Star ever Seen, 28 Billion Light-years Away
The Hubble Space Telescope has glimpsed the most distant single star it's ever observed, glimmering 28 billion light-years away. And the star could be between 50 to 500 times more massive than our sun, and millions of times brighter. It's the farthest detection of a star yet, from 900 million years after the big bang. Astronomers have nicknamed the star Earendel, derived from an Old English words that means "morning star" or "rising light."
This observation of Earendel could help astronomers to investigate the early years of the universe.
When the light that we see from Earendel was emitted, the Universe was less than a billion years old; only 6% of its current age. At that time it was 4 billion lightyears away from the proto-Milky Way, but during the almost 13 billion years it took the light to reach us, the Universe has expanded so that it is now a staggering 28 billion lightyears away.
Apr 01, 2022
NASA Astronaut Mark Vande Hei Back on Earth after Record-breaking Mission
Vande Hei, who lived in space for 355 consecutive days, setting a new record for the longest single spaceflight by an American astronaut, arrived in Houston at NASA's Johnson Space Center (JSC). As per NASA protocol, Vande Hei was then flown back to Houston to start his recovery from living for nearly a year in microgravity.
Vande Hei's mission surpasses the previous single-spaceflight mark by a U.S. astronaut, which was Scott Kelly's 340-day excursion in 2015-16. The overall single-spaceflight record of nearly 438 continuous days is held by Russian cosmonaut Valery Poliyakov, who was on the Soviet-Russian Mir space station between 1994 and 1995.
Mar 30, 2022
Petascale Supercomputer PARAM Shakti at IIT Kharagpur Dedicated to the Nation
PARAM Shakti", a Petascale Supercomputer "at IIT Kharagpur, was dedicated to the nation under National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) – a joint initiative of Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and Department of Science and Technology (DST). PARAM Shakti supercomputing facility is accelerating the research and development activities in multidisciplinary domains of computational and data sciences as it provides large-scale computing power to the user community of IIT Kharagpur and neighbouring academic and R&D institutes.
A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed between IIT Kharagpur and Centre for Development in Advanced Computing (CDAC) in March 2019 to establish this state-of the art Supercomputing Facility with 17680 CPU cores along with 44 GPUs.
The new high-performance computational facility would aid researchers to solve large-scale problems of different fields of Science and Engineering. Some of the identified focus areas in which this supercomputing based research will be of great value addition are: Computational Fluid Dynamics, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data Analytics, Climate Change & Digital Earth, Computational Biology, Cryptography & Security, Smart Infrastructure & Sustainable Cities, Smart Materials etc.