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…
NASA
33 posts
On resource constraints and merit
In the face of complaints about how so few women have been awarded this year’s Swarnajayanti Fellowships in India, some scientists pushed back asking which of the male laureates who had been selected…
A sympathetic science
If you feel the need to respond, please first make sure you have read the post in full. I posted the following tweet a short while ago: With reference to this: Which in turn was with reference to t…
Poor Sanskrit
'BJP MP Says Speaking Sanskrit Beats Diabetes, Boosts Nervous System', The Wire, December 13, 2019: In a debate in the Lok Sabha on December 12 about the Sanskrit University Bill, Ganesh Sing…
The PM's Chandrayaan group-hug
https://twitter.com/BDUTT/status/1170243147626008576 I understand Dutt’s interpretation of the moment in question but with reservations about what it signals for the nation’s many oppressed. For star…
Moon, mission and Modi
Should Prime Minister Narendra Modi not have been in the control room during the autonomous descent phase of Chandrayaan 2? Did his presence exert unnecessary pressure on the ISRO scientists? I don’t…
Review: 'Mission Mangal' (2019)
This review assumes Tanul Thakur’s review as a preamble. There's the argument that ISRO isn't doing much by way of public outreach and trust in the media is at a low, and for many people – mo…
Finding trash in the dumpster
Just as there's no merit in writing a piece that is confused and incomplete, there's no merit in digging through a dumpster and complaining that there's trash. However, that doesn't me…
For space, frugality is a harmful aspiration
Ref: 'ISRO's Chandrayaan-2 mission to cost lesser than Hollywood movie Interstellar - here's how they make it cost-effective', staff, Moneycontrol, February 20, 2018. ∞ 'Chandray…
Why Titan is awesome #11
Titaaaaan! Here we go again. 😄 As has been reported, NASA has been interested in sending a robotic submarine to Saturn's moon Titan to explore the hydrocarbon lakes near its north pole. Various…
ISRO v. SpaceX doesn't make sense
Though I've never met the guy, I don't hold Pallava Bagla in very high regard because his stories – particularly of the Indian space programme – for NDTV have often reeked of simplistic concer…
We don't have a problem with the West, we're just obsessed with it
How much do we not know about what Indian researchers are doing simply because Western scientists haven't written to some of them?…