Union minister Jitendra Singh said that Chandrayaan-3 will be launched in the first half of 2021, indicating that there could be a slight delay in the launch of India's third mission to the moon.
In a written response to a question in Lok Sabha, Singh said that the revised configuration takes care of the robustness in design, capacity enhancement for mission flexibility and at the same time retains the heritage of Chandrayaan-II, which hard-landed on lunar surface last year, to the extent possible.
ISRO Calls Off GSLV-F10 Launch
The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) decided to postpone GISAT-1 onboard GSLV-F10 launch due to technical reasons.
The rocket GSLV-F10 carrying India's first agile Earth observation satellite was scheduled for launch on March 5.
This would have been GSLV's 14th flight and eighth with indigenous cryo. It would also have been the 76th launch mission from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre at Shriharikota.
Mar 03, 2020
Huge Space Snowman is Two Merging Stars
Researchers have discovered a huge snowman-shaped star with an atmospheric composition never seen before.
It is more massive than our Sun but only two-thirds the Earth's diameter.
The object is thought to have resulted from the merger of two so-called white dwarf stars that often explode as powerful supernovas.
As per Dr. Mark Hollands, of Warwick University, the team's discovery could help scientists better understand how this process occurs.
The most exciting aspect of this star is that it must have just about failed to explode as a supernova. There aren't that many white dwarfs this massive.
"There remains much uncertainty about what kind of stellar systems make it to the supernova stage.
Mar 01, 2020
Scientists Detect Biggest Explosion Since Big Bang
Scientists have detected evidence for a colossal explosion in space - five times bigger than anything observed before.
The huge release of energy is thought to have emanated from a supermassive black hole some 390 million light years from Earth.
The eruption is said to have left a giant dent in the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster.
Scentists had long thought there was something strange about Ophiuchus galaxy cluster, which is a giant aggregation containing thousands of individual galaxies intermingled with hot gas and dark matter. X-ray telescopes had spied a curious curved edge to it.
The speculation was that this might be the wall of a cavity that had been sculpted in its gas by emissions from a central black hole.
Feb 29, 2020
Astronomers at UBC Astronomy Club Discovers 17 New Planets
University of British Columbia astronomy student Michelle Kunimoto has discovered 17 new planets, including a potentially habitable, Earth-sized world, by combing through data gathered by NASA's Kepler mission.
Over its original four-year mission, the Kepler satellite looked for planets, especially those that lie in the "Habitable Zones" of their stars, where liquid water could exist on a rocky planet's surface.
The new findings, published in The Astronomical Journal, include one such particularly rare planet. Officially named KIC-7340288 b, the planet discovered by Kunimoto is just 1 ½ times the size of Earth - small enough to be considered rocky, instead of gaseous like the giant planets of the Solar System - and in the habitable zone of its star.
Feb 28, 2020
Cambridge Team Finds Exoplanet Twice Earth's Size
A Cambridge-based Indian-origin astronomer has led the discovery of an exoplanet more than twice the size of Earth considered potentially habitable, opening the search for life on planets significantly larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune.
The research team led by Nikku Madhusudhan at the university's Institute of Astronomy used the mass, radius, and atmospheric data of the exoplanet K2-18b, and determined that it is possible for the planet to host liquid water at habitable conditions beneath its hydrogen-rich atmosphere. The results reported show that the exoplanet is 124 light-years away, and is 2.6 times the radius and 8.6 times the mass of Earth.
It orbits its star within the habitable zone, where temperatures could allow liquid water to exist.
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