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Science In Action: Indian Mars Mission

The PSLV-C25 launch vehicle, carrying the Mars Orbiter probe as its payload, lifts off from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre

25/09/2014

Indian Mars Mission

BBC World Service - Science In Action, Indian Mars Mission

India is the first Asian country to successfully place a satellite into Mars' orbit

Indian Mars mission; Celebrating 60 years of CERN; Wild weather and melting ice; Mapping icy worlds under Antarctica; Finding Exoplanet water.

India is the first Asian country to successfully place a satellite into the Red Planet's orbit. Launched last November, the Indian Space Research Organisation's satellite, informally known as Mangalyaan, successfully entered Mars' orbit on Wednesday 24 September, just two days after Nasa's MAVEN craft. India now joins the list of just four countries to complete a maiden voyage to Mars, behind the US, Russia and Europe – and Mangalyaan is one of the cheapest interplanetary missions to date. Science journalist and co-author of a new book Reaching for the Stars: India's Journey to Mars and Beyond, Pallava Bagla, has been following Mangalyaan’s journey.  

Celebrating 60 Years of CERN
The European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), the world’s largest particle physics laboratory, turns 60 on 29 September. Based on the French-Swiss border near Geneva, the organisation was established in 1954 and has since been at the forefront of some of the biggest scientific achievements including the invention of the World Wide Web by British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee in 1990 and the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012. In 2008, CERN completed the construction of the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator, which was critical in the discovery of the Higgs boson. Professor Jonathan Butterworth from University College London and professor Pedro Teixeira-Dias of Royal Holloway University, were both involved in the ATLAS experiment which discovered this elusive particle.   

Wild Weather and Melting Ice
The Arctic is warming faster than the rest of the globe in response to changes in greenhouse gases resulting in dramatic declines in sea ice.  This week, scientists from across the globe gathered at the Royal Society's meeting on Arctic Sea Ice Reduction to discuss this accelerating loss. As professor Jennifer Francis of Rutgers University in New Jersey explains, this may not just be a problem for the Arctic. She talks at the meeting about the impact that this rapidly warming Arctic may be having on weather patterns elsewhere across the globe in Europe, North America and Asia.   

Mapping Icy Worlds Under Antarctica
Published on 25 September, the Times Atlas shows something new - maps of sub-ice Antarctica and the Arctic. The maps reveal the impressive canyons, lakes, trenches and mountains buried below the ice and were drawn on bedrock data gathered by the Bedmap2, a multi-national collaboration that merged 50 years of geophysical data to create these maps. Peter Fretwell of the British Antarctic Survey and lead author on the Bedmap2 project explains why it is important to understand what lies beneath.  

Finding Exoplanet Water
For the first time, scientists have detected water vapour on a cold exoplanet the size of Neptune. Previously, it had only been possible to measure the atmospheres of larger, Jupiter-sized exoplanets, but these findings from the Hubble and Spitzer Telescopes bring scientists a significant step closer to studying the atmosphere of Earth-sized planets orbiting other stars. Understanding the atmosphere of exoplanets may tell us more about their evolution and formation - Eliza Kempton, assistant professor of physics at Grinnell College in Iowa, explains. 

(Photo: The PSLV-C25 launch vehicle, carrying the Mars Orbiter probe, lifts off from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota © Seshadri Sukumar/AFP/Getty Images)

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