The significance of Cassini's end
because I wrote this on The Wire on September 15. I lied. Truth is, I don't care about Saturn. In fact, I'm fascinated with Cassini because of Saturn. We all are. Without Cassini, Saturn woul…
NASA
33 posts
The bad, avoidable and useless forms of journalism
Bad journalism: A Hindustan Times report on March 2 claims a high-schooler from West Bengal won a "prestigious" scholarship sponsored by NASA to study at Oxford University, having been selec…
Summing up the 'water on Mars' announcement
I wrote an explainer summing up (almost) all we know about the recent NASA announcement of finding water on Mars for the Mumbai Mirror. An excerpt: Because with large oceans of liquid water and an at…
Space is necessarily multifarious, ISRO
Here's a great example of why space-exploration is a multifarious industry where it takes excellence on multiple fronts at the same time to make each mission a success, even on seemingly unrelated…
Defending my review of 'The Martian'
I wrote my first movie review for The Martian and I wonder if I've done it some disservice, although I think it is defensible (from myself, not anyone else). In a wonderful interview of Salman Rus…
The Planetary Society says humans orbiting Mars is important before they land on it
A notional timeline for the 2033 mission was presented also, with crewed test-flights in cislunar orbits being planned for 2025 and 2027. The launch window provides a suitable focus year because NASA hopes to have tested the necessary spaceflight technologies and experience through its ARM in the 20…
NASA readies to test history's largest, most powerful booster for its new rocket
NASA's massive heavy-lift rocket, the Space Launch System, which will one day ferry humans to deep-space destinations and back, has become notorious for the scale of engineering backing it. In Sep…
A voyager on an unknown sea
Download vger20141215.mp3 Early 2012. The Voyager 1 space-probe is millions of kilometres beyond the orbit of the dwarf planet Pluto. In fact, it's in a region of space filled with scattered rock…
Spitzer has helped choose a near-Earth object the A.R.M. could bring nearer
From its perch up in space, Spitzer can use its heat-sensitive infrared vision to spy asteroids and get better estimates of their sizes. This is what the author of a study that appeared in Astrophysi…