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US to provide Pak two advanced P-3C Orion naval surveillance aircrafts

April 30, 2010 By vani Leave a Comment

Washington, Apr.30 (ANI): The United States would be providing two upgraded P-3C Orion surveillance aircrafts to Pakistan to boost its maritime security capabilities.

Pakistan is due to get seven of these reconnaissance aircrafts, out of which the first three would be handed over to it during a ceremony in Jacksonville, Florida, a spokesperson for the Pakistan Embassy in Washington said.

The spokesperson underlined that the acquisition of the latest aircraft reflects the growing cooperation between the US and Pakistani navies.

Pakistan currently commands the Combined Task Force (CTF) 150, and the US aims to strengthen its maritime capability so that it can effectively protect the vast sea-lanes, which come under the Coalition Maritime Campaign Plan.

The Coalition Maritime Campaign Plan stretches from Strait of Hormuz to the Red Sea, covering 2.4 million sq miles and bordering 14 nations along the Gulf of Oman, Arabian Sea, Horn of Africa and Red Sea, The Daily Times reports.

Pakistan is also acquiring 30-year old US frigate USS McInerney ‘free of cost’ under the foreign military funding. (ANI)

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New evidence points towards water on Moon

September 19, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, September 19 (ANI): Two separate lunar missions have found evidence which indicates that the polar regions of the moon are chock full of water-altered minerals.

According to a report in Nature News, early results from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), launched on June 18, are offering a wide array of watery signals.

The Moon, in fact, has water in all sorts of places: not just locked up in minerals, but scattered throughout the broken-up surface, and, potentially, in blocks or sheets of ice at depth.

“We are on the verge of a renaissance in our thinking about the poles of the Moon, including how water ice gets there,” said Anthony Colaprete, principal investigator for the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS), which on October 9, will slam into a polar crater with the intention of ploughing up a plume of water ice for many telescopic eyes to see.

The initial LRO results confirm what was long suspected as a way for ice to stay trapped on the Moon for billions of years.

A thermal mapping instrument showed that permanently shadowed regions within deep polar craters are as cold as 35o Kelvin (-238o Celsius).

Project scientist Richard Vondrak said that they are the coldest spots in the Solar System – even colder than the surface of Pluto.

Variations in the flux of neutrons suggests variability in water content among craters.

But, the surprise comes from a different instrument on LRO, which counts slow-moving neutrons as a way of measuring hydrogen abundance in the top metre or so of the surface.

This hydrogen is often interpreted as a proxy for water ice, although it could also be molecular hydrogen or hydrogen trapped in other molecules.

The LRO instrument has already found a significant excess of hydrogen at the poles.

But, with added resolution, it is seeing surprising variability within the polar regions. Some of the craters appear enriched in hydrogen. Others are not.

Stranger still, some areas outside the crater walls, which were thought to get too hot for water to linger, show an excess of hydrogen.

Vondrak said this shows that the water could have arrived more recently, or that it can persist if buried as impacts till the lunar soil.

If the LCROSS impact spews up ice, it will eliminate the last vestiges of doubt about water on the Moon.

It could also start a new hunt: to find a record of impact events, such as water-rich comet strikes, that put the ice there in the first place. (ANI)

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US army set for “hopping rotochut” that hops to avoid rubble trouble

September 19, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, September 19 (ANI): The U.S. army’s fleet of robots will soon be enhanced with the addition of forthcoming reconnaissance craft called the ‘hopping rotochute’, which will be capable of travelling deep into obstacle-ridden spaces like caves and rubble-laden buildings to video what it finds.

The self-righting probe is being developed for the Army Research Lab in Aberdeen, Maryland, by Eric Beyer and Mark Costello, a pair of robotics engineers at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.

The project attains significance because present-day military robots, which run on small tank-style tracks, cannot cope with irregular surfaces and obstacles such as rubble or boulders.

“They usually have trouble and get stuck with even low obstacles and walls a couple of feet high,” says Costello.

Although small helicopters are one alternative, continuous flying drains the batteries fast.

Thus, Costello stresses the need for a rotor-powered, bottom-heavy, self-righting vehicle that spends most of its time on the ground, conserving battery power.

AS to whether repeated hopping might harm the craft, a spokesman for the Impact Centre at Cranfield University in Bedfordshire, UK, said: “From a crashworthiness point of view this concept looks perfectly feasible. There should be no problem with the vehicle surviving hundreds of impacts, which is roughly equivalent to dropping a mobile phone from waist height.” (ANI)

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Cracks on Mars a result of evaporating lakes in ancient times

September 17, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, September 16 (ANI): Networks of giant polygonal troughs etched across crater basins on Mars have been identified as desiccation cracks caused by evaporating lakes, providing further evidence of a warmer, wetter Martian past.

The findings were presented at the European Planetary Science Congress by PhD student M. Ramy El Maarry of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research.

The polygons are formed when long cracks in the surface of the Martian soil intersect.

El Maarry investigated networks of cracks inside 266 impact basins across the surface of Mars and observed polygons reaching up to 250 meters in diameter.

Polygonal troughs have been imaged by several recent missions but, until now, they have been attributed to thermal contractions in the Martian permafrost.

El Maarry created an analytical model to determine the depth and spacing of cracks caused by stresses building up through cooling in the Martian soil.

He found that polygons caused by thermal contraction could have a maximum diameter of only about 65 meters, much smaller than the troughs he was seeing in the craters.

“I got excited when I saw that the crater floor polygons seemed to be too large to be caused by thermal processes. I also saw that they resembled the desiccation cracks that we see on Earth in dried up lakes,” said El Maarry.

“The stresses that build up when liquids evaporate can cause deep cracks and polygons on the scale I was seeing in the craters,” he added.

El Maarry identified the crater floor polygons using images taken by the MOC camera on Mars Global Surveyor and the HiRISE and Context cameras on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

The polygons in El Maarry’s survey had an average diameter of between 70 and 140 kilometers, with the width of the actual cracks ranging between 1 and 10 meters.

Evidence suggests that between 4.6 and 3.8 billion years ago, Mars was covered in significant amounts of water.

Rain and river water would have collected inside impact crater basins, creating lakes that may have existed for several thousand years before drying out.

However, according to El Maarry, in the northern hemisphere, some of the crater floor polygons could have been formed much more recently.

“When a meteorite impacts with the Martian surface, the heat can melt ice trapped beneath the Martian crust and create what we call a hydrothermal system. Liquid water can fill the crater to form a lake, covered in a thick layer of ice. Even under current climatic conditions, this may take many thousands of years to disappear, finally resulting in the desiccation patterns,” said El Maarry. (ANI)

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Scientists identify lake shorelines on Mars

August 9, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, August 9(ANI): A team of scientists, using images from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on board NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, have reported direct evidence of lake shorelines in the Shalbatana Vallis in Mars.

Scientists generally believe that warm, wet conditions existed on Mars until only about 3.7 billion years ago.

In recent years, however, remote sensing studies have hinted at the existence of Martian lakes during the Hesperian epoch (about 3.5 billion to 1.8 billion years ago).

Now, sub-meter-scale images from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter show clear, unambiguous evidence of shorelines of a lake more than 450 meters (1,476 feet) deep that formed about 3.4 billion years ago.

The study indicates that conditions favorable for flowing water and lake formation may have existed for thousands of years on Mars during the Hesperian epoch, which has been thought to be a period during which surface conditions did not allow significant hydrological activity.

According to the researchers, the sedimentary deposits associated with the lake in Shalbatana Vallis should be considered a priority for further study by future landed Mars missions. (ANI)

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Martian climate was life-friendly more recently than thought

July 1, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, July 1 (ANI): In a new research, scientists have found evidence that indicates the Martian climate was life-friendly more recently than thought.

Matthew Balme, a research scientist with the Tucson-based Planetary Science Institute and a research fellow at the United Kingdom’s Open University, discovered signs of melting permafrost in images from NASA’s HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) camera, which is flying aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

The images show that landforms once thought to be shaped by volcanism were actually modified by the expansion and contraction of ice due to freeze/thaw cycles, according to Balme.

Balme studied an outflow channel that was active as recently as 2 to 8 million years ago.

The channel contains polygonal patterns, branched channels, blocky debris and mound/cone formations, all of which are similar to formations found where permafrost melts on Earth.

“These observations demonstrate that ice melted near the Martian equator within the past few million years and then refroze,” Balme said. “This probably happened over many freeze/thaw cycles,” he added.

Since liquid water is essential to life as we know it, this equatorial channel would be an ideal place to hunt for traces of past or present Martian life, Balme added. (ANI)

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Mars had warmer weather in its recent past than previously thought

June 30, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, June 30 (ANI): A new research led by a UK scientist has indicated that Mars had significantly warmer weather in its recent past than previously thought.

Dr. Matthew Balme, from The Open University, made the new discovery by studying detailed images of equatorial landforms that formed by melting of ice-rich soils.
is work indicates that the Martian surface experienced “freeze thaw” cycles as recently as 2 million years ago, and that Mars has not been locked in permafrost conditions for billions of years as had been previously thought.

The high-resolution images, which show a variety of interesting landforms, were taken with NASA’s HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging science Experiment) which is onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) mission.

According to Dr. Balme, “The features of this terrain were previously interpreted to be the result of volcanic processes. The amazingly detailed images from HiRISE show that the features are instead caused by the expansion and contraction of ice, and by thawing of ice-rich ground. This all suggests a very different climate to what we see today.”

All of the landforms observed are in an outflow channel, thought to have been active as recently as 2 million to 8 million years ago.

Since the landforms exist within, and cut across, the pre-existing features of the channel, this suggests that they too were created within this timeframe.

The pictures show polygonally patterned surfaces, branched channels, blocky debris and mound/cone structures.

All of these features are similar to landforms on Earth typical of areas where permafrost terrain is melting.

“These observations demonstrate not only that there was ice near the Martian equator in the last few million years, but also that the ice melted to form liquid water and then refroze. And this probably happened for many cycles,” Dr. Balme said.

“Given that liquid water seems to be essential for life, these kinds of environments could be a great place to look for evidence of past life on Mars,” he added.

According to Professor Keith Mason, CEO of the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), “Understanding current processes on the surface of Mars and the past and present role of climate improves our knowledge of the planet’s history and thus the chances of one day detecting evidence for past or present life.” (ANI)

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Grand old IAF air warrior passes away at 93

June 29, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

New Delhi, June 29 (ANI): Group Captain Gurdial Singh Paul, who served in the Indian Air Force from its formative years, passed away on Saturday. He was 93.

Singh was cremated near Brar Square, today. A wreath was placed on behalf of the IAF by Air Officer Commanding, Air Force Station, Race Course, Air Commodore Ajit S Bhonsle.

Born on November 3, 1916, in Chittavatni in Pakistan, Singh studied at the Khalsa College, Amritsar.He joined the Royal Air Force and was commissioned to the IAF at Air Force Station Tambram.

In 1943, he visited the UK for training, sailing from Mumbai to Durban to Southampton on the Elle de France, encountering German U-boat in the Atlantic. He spent time at various stations of the RAF in London, Cranfield, and Branham etc.

He had the privilege to serve in the same Squadron as the actor, Clark Gable. At times, Gurdial flew over occupied France and Germany on air reconnaissance flights and on more than one occasion, had close encounters with the German Messerschmitt.

In 1946, he married Jaswant Kaur. The partition of India caused the personal losses of his in-laws, with Gurdial being in Lahore on his way from Peshawar.

He had served with officers of the like of Air Chief Marshal Arjan Singh, Air Chief Marshal I H Latif, Air Marshal S Mukherjee, Air Marshal Rajaram, AVM Pinto, Air Commodore Mehar Baba, Group Captain Sarkar and Wing Commander Majumdar (an ace pilot during the 40s).

After serving at the Air Force stations Jalahalli and Secunderabad, Singh worked at Air Headquarters, New Delhi for several years in the Adminstration Branch, eventually going to Air Force Station Avadi as Station Commander in 1967. Before this tenure, it was the Staff College Hyderabad and NDC, New Delhi. He retired from the Air Force in 1971, as Station Commander Race Course, New Delhi.

Singh is survived by his wife, two daughters, a son and three grand children. (ANI)

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NASA’s Moon mission successfully completes lunar maneuver

June 25, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, June 24 (ANI): NASA’s Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, successfully completed its most significant early mission milestone on June 23 with a lunar swingby and calibration of its science instruments.

The satellite will search for water ice in a permanently shadowed crater at the moon’s south pole.

With the assist of the moon’s gravity, LCROSS and its attached Centaur booster rocket successfully entered into polar Earth orbit at 6:20 a.m. PDT on June 23.

The maneuver puts the spacecraft and Centaur on course for a pair of impacts near the moon’s south pole on October 9.

“The successful completion of the LCROSS swingby proves the science instruments are functioning as expected. It is a testament to the hard work and dedication of the entire team,” said Dan Andrews, LCROSS project manager at NASA’s Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, California.

“We are elated at the results from the maneuver and eagerly anticipate the impacts in early October,” he added.

During its swing by the moon, the spacecraft’s instruments were turned on and calibrated by scanning three sites on the lunar surface.

These sites were the craters Mendeleev, Goddard C and Giordano Bruno. They were selected because they offer a variety of terrain types, compositions and illumination conditions.

The spacecraft also scanned the lunar horizon to confirm its instruments are aligned in preparation for observing the Centaur’s debris plume.

“Each instrument returned good data that the science team will spend the next few weeks analyzing,” said Anthony Colaprete, LCROSS project scientist at Ames.

“These data will ensure we are as prepared as possible for monitoring and interpreting data we receive during impact,” he added.

LCROSS and its attached Centaur upper stage rocket are now in a long, looping polar orbit around Earth and the moon.

Each orbit will be roughly perpendicular to the moon’s orbit around Earth and take about 37 days to complete.

Before impact, the spacecraft and Centaur will make approximately three orbits.

LCROSS and the Centaur separately will collide with the moon at approximately 7:30 a.m. EDT on October 9, creating a pair of debris plumes that will be analyzed for the presence of water ice or water vapor, hydrocarbons and hydrated materials.

The spacecraft and Centaur are targeted to impact the moon’s south pole near the Cabeus region.

The exact target crater will be identified 30 days before impact, after considering information collected by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and observatories on Earth. (ANI)

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UK Police training for 30-minute response to ward off Mumbai style attacks

June 22, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

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London, June 22 (ANI): To deal with a Mumbai-style terrorist attack, British Police and hotel staff are being trained to ward off danger in the crucial first 30 minutes, amid growing concern that extremists may target venues in London and other western cities. /pp
Detectives from the Metropolitan Police Counter-Terrorism Command have visited India to learn lessons from the attacks, which killed 173 people and wounded 308 over the course of three days in November last year. /pp
Police firearms units, already trained to shoot to kill if necessary, are being taught to head off the danger of a siege in the crucial first 30 minutes, The Telegraph reports. /pp
Hotel staff are being trained to spot terrorists on reconnaissance missions as well as how to evacuate guests – or whether to advise them to lock themselves in, and floor plans of major hotels are being gathered. /pp
A senior government official said that counter-terrorism officials have had a lot of detailed briefings which concentrate on training police armed tactical response units to act quickly for public protection. /pp
This has been an eye-opener and we are refreshing our plans, the official added./pp
Should a hostage situation develop, the SAS would be put on standby and attempts would be made to try to limit the information that terrorists could receive from live television by keeping cameras away from the scene. /pp
Officers have made a series of presentations within the Metropolitan Police and Government warning that a Mumbai-style attack is a real possibility. /pp
They believe that terrorist groups with links to the criminal underworld might be trying to buy arms because they are easier to obtain than explosives, the paper reports. (ANI)/p

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Blair urged Brown to hold Iraq war probe secretly

June 21, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, June 21 (ANI): British Prime Minister Gordon Brown decided to hold the independent inquiry into the Iraq war behind the closed doors because he was urged by his predecessor Tony Blair to do so, The Observer has claimed.

Blair was reportedly afraid of a “show trial” that he dreaded the prospect of giving evidence in public and under oath about the use of intelligence and about his numerous private discussions with US President George Bush over plans for war.

The report says that Blair, who resisted pressure for a full public inquiry while he was prime minister, deliberately didn’t express his view in person to Brown because he feared it might leak out.

Instead, messages on the issue were relayed through others to Sir Gus O’Donnell, the cabinet secretary, who conveyed them to Brown in the days leading up to the announcement of the inquiry last week.

A Downing Street spokesman, however, said: “This was a decision for the current prime minister, not for Tony Blair. We have always been clear that we consulted a number of people before announcing the commencement of the inquiry, including former government figures. We are not going to get into the nature of those discussions.”

The paper further claims that six weeks before the war, at a meeting in Washington, Bush and Blair were forced to contemplate alternative scenarios that might trigger a second UN resolution legitimising military action.

Bush told Blair that the US had drawn up a provocative plan “to fly U-2 reconnaissance aircraft, painted in UN colours, over Iraq with fighter cover.” Bush said that if Saddam fired at the planes, he would put Iraq in breach of UN resolutions and legitimise military action.

Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, whose party opposed the war from the outset, said: “If this is true about Blair demanding secrecy, it is outrageous that an inquiry into the biggest foreign policy disaster since Suez is being muzzled to suit the individual needs of the man who took us to war.” (ANI)

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Ancient Mars lake may have held as much water as Lake Champlain in US

June 20, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, June 20 (ANI): Scientists have found evidence of the remnants of an ancient lake nestled in a valley near the Martian equator, which may have held as much water as Lake Champlain.

According to a report in Disocvery News, the evidence was found by Gaetano di Achille and a team of researchers at the University of Colorado in Boulder, US, in the form of an ancient shoreline ringing Shalbatana Vallis, a gash in Mars’ surface just east of the massive volcanic province, Tharsis Rise.

Though dry and frigid now, the traces it left behind hint at a water body younger than any other on the planet, and its sediments are a prime target for finding fossilized alien life.

When Mars coalesced billions of years ago it was much warmer, and probably wet. Features that appear to be eroded river deltas more than 3.7 billion years old dot parts of the planet’s surface.

Researchers have speculated they are evidence of lakes – and primitive life may have once existed on the surface.

Now, Gaetano’s team of researchers estimated from powerful images obtained using the powerful High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), that the ancient lake was 450 meters (1,476 feet) deep and nearly identical in volume to Lake Champlain in Vermont.

Even more intriguingly, it dried up around 3.4 billion years ago – 300 million years after the Red Planet’s “warm and wet” phase is thought to have ended.

Its deltas appear rich in fine-grained sediments, a sign that they have been relatively untouched by erosion.

“Deltas are high priority targets for exploration because they imply copious and long-lived water,” team member Brian Hynek of the University of Colorado in Boulder told Discovery News. “And the sedimentation process is very effective at burying and preserving organic material,” he said.

The lake is a tempting place to look for fossilized alien life forms.

“Life wouldn’t have arisen in this lake, but lakes on Earth provide many habitats for countless organisms,” said Patrick McGovern of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston.

“This lake could have helped sustain and proliferate life on Mars, if it ever arose,” he added. (ANI)

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Satellites’ launch to give boost to NASA’s ‘return to Moon’ mission

May 22, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, May 22 (ANI): NASA’s return to the moon will get a boost in June with the launch of two satellites that will return a wealth of data about Earth’s nearest neighbor.

On May 21, the agency outlined the upcoming missions of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, and the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS.

The spacecraft will launch together June 17 aboard an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

Using a suite of seven instruments, LRO will help identify safe landing sites for future human explorers, locate potential resources, characterize the radiation environment and test new technology.

LCROSS will seek a definitive answer about the presence of water ice at the lunar poles.

It will use the spent second stage Atlas Centaur rocket in an unprecedented way that will culminate with two spectacular impacts on the moon’s surface.

“These two missions will provide exciting new information about the moon, our nearest neighbor,” said Doug Cooke, associate administrator of NASA’s Exploration Systems Mission Directorate in Washington.

“Imaging will show dramatic landscapes and areas of interest down to one-meter resolution. The data also will provide information about potential new uses of the moon. These teams have done a tremendous job designing and building these two spacecraft,” he added.

LRO’s instruments will help scientists compile high resolution, three-dimensional maps of the lunar surface and also survey it in the far ultraviolet spectrum.

The satellite’s instruments will help explain how the lunar radiation environment may affect humans and measure radiation absorption with a plastic that is like human tissue.

LRO’s instruments also will allow scientists to explore the moon’s deepest craters, look beneath its surface for clues to the location of water ice, and identify and explore both permanently lit and permanently shadowed regions.

High-resolution imagery from its camera will help identify landing sites and characterize the moon’s topography and composition.

A miniaturized radar will image the poles and test the system’s communications capabilities.

“LRO is an amazingly sophisticated spacecraft,” said Craig Tooley, LRO project manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

“Its suite of instruments will work in concert to send us data in areas where we’ve been hungry for information for years,” he added. (ANI)

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Jumping robots may soon find role in military service

May 11, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, May 10 (ANI): Robots that can leap 8 metres vertically to clear walls or fences may soon find themselves in the military.

Sandia National Laboratories’ prototype Urban Hopper can really do wonders just by hopping.

Now robot maker Boston Dynamics has landed the job of producing a military version with a dash of more self-control.

US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is funding the programme, says it wants the hopper for urban reconnaissance and intelligence gathering – although it admits it could also be fitted with a raft of weapons, reports New Scientist.

Sandia’s shoebox-sized prototype, which is driven by an electric motor, rolls along on wheels. It jumps using a gas piston which is powered by methylacetylene and nitrous oxide.

However, its leaps so far are pretty haphazard.

“The existing hoppers do not maintain a stable orientation during hops, but tumble randomly,” says DARPA spokesman Mark Peterson. (ANI)

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Unprecedented security as Mumbai terrorism trial begins

April 16, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

New Delhi – More than 500 policemen were deployed at a high-security prison in the Indian city of Mumbai Wednesday as a special court began the trial of the lone alleged terrorist captured during the terrorist attack in the city in November, news reports said. Ajmal Amir Kasab was expected to appear in person for the first time before special court judge ML Tahiliyani.

Kasab, allegedly a member of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist organization, was reported to be part of a 10-member group that mounted attacks in Mumbai for three days beginning November 26.

He was captured hours after the assault. More than 170 people were killed in the terrorist action.

Kasab has been accused of murder and waging war against the nation among other charges.

He is being kept in custody at the Arthur Road Jail in Mumbai where the trial is being held.

The corridor from his cell to the courtroom is bomb-proof, chemicals-proof and fitted throughout with closed circuit television cameras, Times Now television channel reported.

Public prosecutor Ujjwal Nikam and Kasab’s state-appointed lawyer Anjali Waghmare were both in the court along with the judge, reports said.

Media was restricted with about 60 journalists given special bar-coded entry cards.

The trial had been scheduled for earlier this month, but was delayed until construction work required for the special court was complete.

Two Indian nationals who are accused along with Kasab will also face trial.

Faheem Ansari and Sabauddin Ahmed are charged with conducting reconnaissance of the Taj Mahal and Trident hotels and the railway station that were the terrorists’ targets. They allegedly prepared maps and gave them to the LET.

Indian police filed a 11,000-page charge sheet against 38 people including Kasab. A total of 2,202 witnesses have been identified but it is not yet clear how many will be called to testify.

The charges allege key planners of the assaults included Pakistan-based LET leaders Hafeez Sayyid, Fahim Ansari, Zaki-ur Rehman Lakhvi and Zarar Shah.

Those men are in Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir, and have been listed in the charge-sheet as “wanted absconders.” (dpa)

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Maiden flight of indigenous UAV

April 5, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Kolar (Karnataka), April 5 (ANI): With the successful flight of Nishant, the indigenous unmanned air vehicle (UAV), a new chapter has been added in the annals of Indian Aviation.

It was witnessed at Veerapura, a small village, eight kilometres from Kolar in Karnataka, where from the abandoned runway of World War II vintage, the indigenous Nishant, jointly designed and developed by National Aerospace Laboratories (NAL), a Council of Industrial and Scientific Research (CSIR) lab, Vehicles Research and Development Establishment VRDE (VRDE), Ahmednagar and Aeronautical Development Establishment (ADE), Bangalore, took off.

The flight took off at 1157 hours in the morning of March 31 and climbed to an altitude of 1.8 kilometres effortlessly before cruising for a duration of 35 mts.

The air vehicle was recovered safely at the intended place in dried up Muduvadi lake after a total flight duration of 40 mts.

The event was witnessed by key personnel, P.S. Krishnan, Director ADE, Dr C.L. Dhamejani, Director VRDE and Dr. AR Upadhya, Director NAL, Regional Director RCMA and Regional Director, AQA and other senior officers.

The Wankel engine is first of its kind totally designed and developed in the country. Today, very few countries in the world have the capability to develop and master this technology.

The provisional flight clearance for the first indigenous prototype engine was given by the certifying agency, RCMA in a short ceremony held at the launch pad. The engine was cleared for flight after a rigorous ground and endurance test run.

The engine weighs about 30 kgs and is known for its high power to Weight ratio in single rotor category. The engine performed very well in flight while meeting all the requirements of the Air Vehicle.

It’s an indigenous engine and is expected to replace the present imported engine of Nishant.

The engine has a power of 55 hp and can also be used for powering smaller air vehicles, automotive, Out Board Motors, and Industrial applications.

The event signifies an achievement in many ways, as it is for the first time that a wankel engine has been developed within the country and a UAV has been flown with an indigenous engine. It is planned to use this developed technology for future application for the Unmanned Air Vehicle (UAV)’s under development in ADE, Bangalore.

NISHANT is a reconnaissance UAV which has completed its user trials with Indian Army and is in the verge of handing over few of these air vehicles to Indian Army very shortly. (ANI)

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Subsurface ice on Mars exposed by recent impact craters

March 31, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, March 31 (ANI): The HiRISE camera aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has observed some small, freshly gouged craters in images taken in 2008, which in turn have exposed hidden subsurface ice on the Red Planet.

According to a report in New Scientist, seen at five sites over a latitude range of 43 degrees to 56 degrees north, the excavations are typically 3 to 6 meters across and a third to two-thirds of a meter deep.

One cluster must have appeared sometime between June and August, and a somewhat larger pit showed up between January and September.

What did astound the team were splashes of white seen in and around a handful of these craterlets.

Apparently, fist-sized impactors had punched into a layer of ice hidden by a topping of dust about a third of a metre deep.

In the months that followed, these snowy splashes gradually faded from view.

Water ice isn’t stable at the craters’ latitudes, so most likely, it gradually sublimated, or vaporised, into the atmosphere, leaving behind a veneer of any dust that had been mixed with it.

The disappearing act might also be due in part to a coating of dust blown in from the atmosphere.

Either way, notes HiRISE investigator Shane Byrne of the University of Arizona, the icy deposits had to be at least a couple of inches (several centimeters) thick, and they couldn’t have been unearthed from more than a foot or two (0.3-0.6 m) down.

According to Byrne, prior surveys, particularly one done by the neutron spectrometer aboard NASA’s Mars Odyssey orbiter, show that vast reservoirs of ice lay barely buried across most of the planet’s polar and mid-latitude regions.

But, scientists are only now realising just how near the surface the ice lies – and how easily it can be reached.

“It’s probably just tens of centimeters down,” said HiRISE team leader Alfred McEwen. (ANI)

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Methane-producing mineral discovered on Mars

March 28, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, March 28 (ANI): Scientists have reported the discovery of a methane-producing mineral on Mars.

According to a report in Nature News, the evidence for the existence of the mineral, known as serpentine, was found by Bethany Ehlmann, a PhD student at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

Ehlmann used a spectrometer on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to identify two small outcrops of the mineral.

Serpentine arises from another mineral, olivine, in a hydrothermal process in which hydrogen gas is produced – a potential energy source for microbes that could in turn produce methane.

The process of serpentinization also produces methane itself, without the need for life. “It was a past source of methane, for sure,” said Ehlmann.

Serpentine can also be altered, in lower temperature water, into carbonate.

However, the finding does not rule out life on Mars today. That depends on whether the presence of serpentine has anything to do with the apparent production of present-day methane.

“It’s certainly an intriguing coincidence that one of the major regions in which we find these minerals has been highlighted as a possible source region of methane. But, there’s this timing problem,” said Ehlmann.

The problem of timing arises because serpentine on Mars is ancient, about 3.8 billion years old, whereas the reports of methane gas are contemporary.

Yet it is possible, according to Ehlmann, that fractures deep underground could be providing the necessary water and heat for serpentine to be formed today, and for methane to percolate up. (ANI)

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Mars domes may be mud volcanoes

March 28, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, March 27 (ANI): Scientists at NASA have identified dozens of mounds or domes in the northern plains of Mars, which they say bear a striking resemblance to mud volcanoes.

According to a report by BBC News, the domes on the Red Planet were detected using images taken by NASA’s Mars Odyssey spacecraft, and Carlton Allen and Dorothy Oehler of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Infrared data also show the domes cool more quickly at night than the surrounding rock, as one might expect if they were made of sediment.

Together with David Baker from Brown University, the researchers used instruments on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) to observe several of these structures in a northern region known as Acidalia Planitia.

Data from the MRO’s Crism experiment indicate that the material in the domes is more oxidised than the rock of the surrounding plains.

This might suggest the presence of iron oxides, which form in the presence of liquid water.

They also took pictures of the structures with the HiRise camera on MRO; the images show the bright domes standing out against the dark basaltic rock of the surrounding plains.

Dr Allen told BBC News the structures resembled smooth cones with “no breaks”, which visibly feathered out towards the margins.

The observations, he said, were consistent with material that is “smooth, soft and easily eroded”.

On Earth, the largest concentration of mud volcanoes is in Azerbaijan and the adjacent Caspian Sea. But, they have been found at more than 40 sites on land and at more than 20 locations beneath the sea.

They are formed when pressurized gas and liquid from as much as several kilometers down, breach the surface. They belch out slurries of fluid, mud and rocks, as well as gases such as methane.

“In Azerbaijan, there is so much methane coming out that they can catch fire,” said Dr Allen.

This raises the possibility that mud volcanoes could contribute to the methane observed in the Martian atmosphere.

Methane should last for only a short time in the atmosphere until it is destroyed by sunlight, so its continued presence means it is being replenished by some unknown process.

According to Dr Allen, the team had found no evidence that the domes could be active today, as most show clear evidence of erosion. But, he suggested they could have formed in the last 10 million years.

Researchers suggest that, if life does exist deep beneath the Martian surface, mud volcanoes could be one of the best ways to get at the evidence. (ANI)

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NASA and Microsoft to make planetary images and data available to public via Internet

March 25, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, March 25 (ANI): NASA and Microsoft Corporation have announced plans to make planetary images and data available to the public via the Internet under a Space Act Agreement.

Through this project, NASA and Microsoft jointly will develop the technology and infrastructure necessary to make the most interesting NASA content, including high-resolution scientific images and data from Mars and the moon, explorable on WorldWide Telescope, Microsoft’s online virtual telescope for exploring the universe.

The WorldWide Telescope is a Web 2.0 visualization environment that functions as a virtual telescope, bringing together imagery from ground- and space-based telescopes for a seamless, rich media guided exploration of the universe.

“Making NASA’s scientific and astronomical data more accessible to the public is a high priority for NASA, especially given the new administration’s recent emphasis on open government and transparency,” said Ed Weiler, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

Under the joint agreement, NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, will process and host more than 100 terabytes of data, enough to fill 20,000 DVDs.

WorldWide Telescope will incorporate the data later in 2009 and feature imagery from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, known as MRO.

Launched in August 2005, MRO has been examining Mars with a high-resolution camera and five other instruments since 2006 and has returned more data than all other Mars missions combined.

“This collaboration between Microsoft and NASA will enable people around the world to explore new images of the moon and Mars in a rich, interactive environment through the WorldWide Telescope,” said Tony Hey, corporate vice president of Microsoft External Research in Redmond, Washington.

“WorldWide Telescope serves as a powerful tool for computer science researchers, educators and students to explore space and experience the excitement of computer science,” he added.

Also available will be images from a camera aboard NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, when publicly released starting this fall.

Scheduled to launch this May, LRO will spend at least a year in a low, polar orbit approximately 30 miles above the lunar surface collecting detailed information about the lunar environment.

“NASA is excited to collaborate with Microsoft to share its portfolio of planetary images with students and lifelong learners,” said S. Pete Worden, director of Ames.
“This is a compelling astronomical resource and will help inspire our next generation of astronomers,” he added. (ANI)

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