India's science leadership
On October 17, the National Council for Education Research and Training (NCERT) introduced a reading module for middle-school students called “Chandrayaan Utsav”. It was released by Union Education Mi…
Chandrayaan 3
11 posts
A difficulty celebrating Chandrayaan 3
I'm grateful to Avijit Pathak for his article in Indian Express on August 29. After the Chandrayaan 3 mission achieved its primary objective, to soft-land a robotic lander on the moon's south…
NYT's ISRO coverage continues assault on sense
The New York Times refuses to learn, perpetuating views of ISRO that are equal parts blurry and illiterate, and often missing points that become clearer with just a little bit of closer reading. The l…
Looking (only) for Nehru
I have a habit of watching one old Tamil film a day. Yesterday evening, I was watching a film released in 1987, called Ivargal Indiyargal ('They Are Indians'). In a scene in the film, an offic…
Land on the moon, feet on the earth
Yesterday was fantastic. India made a few kinds of history, when one is great enough, by autonomously landing a robotic instrument in the moon's south polar region. Some seven hours later, it depl…
Landing Day
Good luck, Chandrayaan 3. Good luck also to all the journalists covering this event from within India – a unique location because it's where you will feel the most excitement today about the missi…
Making sense of Luna 25
At the outset, let's hope the unfortunate demise of Russia's Luna 25 mission to the moon will finally silence the social media brigade that's been calling it a competitor to India's Ch…
The shadows of Chandrayaan 2
When in September 2019 the surface component of the Chandrayaan 2 mission failed, with the 'Vikram' lander crashing on the moon's surface instead of gently touching down, there was a sense…
A request to ISRO about Chandrayaan 3
The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has said its launch window for the Chandrayaan 3 mission is July 12-19. For now, the mission is expected to lift off on July 14 (at 2.35 pm IST). Chandray…
ISRO's national interest bullshit
For data and other objects, like images and videos, it places in the public domain, the Indian government attaches the GODL license – short for ‘government open data license’. The terms of this licens…
A new map of Titan
It’s been a long time since I’ve obsessed over Titan, primarily because after the Cassini mission ended, the pace of updates about Titan died down, and because other moons of the Solar System (Europa,…