A Lifetime Eclipse

July 22, 2009 is going to be one special day in our lives being the day of the longest total solar eclipse of our lifetime. The eclipse will commence soon after sunrise starting in the Gulf of Cambay at Surat, Gujarat and then pan across India. The shadow of the moon will be so large during this eclipse that even at sunrise the duration of totality will be over three minutes. The shadow very quickly moves across the breadth of India towards Arunachal Pradesh. It spans a third of the entire path in India, 900 km out of 2,500 km. Read the rest of this entry »

Oceansat-2 and GSAT-4

After attracting world attention last month by launching the country’s first “spy satellite,” the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) is already planning to launch the indigenously built Oceansat-2 satellite by July end or July.

G Madhavan Nair, Chairman, ISRO

“It will be a unique mission and the satellite would enable us to study the sea surface, wind and also track down the fishing zones,” Nair told reporters on the sidelines of a national seminar on ‘Aerospace Expanding Frontiers-Technologies and Challenges’. Read the rest of this entry »