India on the moon: Chandrayaan-1 successful

Posted on October 22, 2008 by Rashid Faridi

Chandrayaan-1, India’s maiden moon spacecraft, was put into Transfer Orbit around the earth by the Polar Launch Vehicle PSLV-C11 after it blasted off from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre.

The 1,380 kg Chandrayaan-1, carrying 11 payloads, was released into a Transfer Orbit 18.2 minutes after the PSLV-C11 blasted off.

After a series of procedures over the next two weeks, the spacecraft would reach its desired Lunar orbit and placed at a height of 100 km from the Lunar surface, marking the operational phase of the mission which would put India in the elite lunar club.

Earlier, at the end of the 49-hour countdown, the 44.4 meter tall four-stage PSLV-11 lifted off from the second launch pad into a cloudy sky.

This is the 14th flight of ISRO’s workhorse PSLV, which had launched 29 satellites into a variety of orbits since 1993, and 13th successive one in a row.

Chandrayaan-1 is carrying 11 payloads, five entirely designed and developed in India, three from European Space Agency, one from Bulgaria and two from US, which would explore the Moon over the next two years.

Indian Space Research Organisation Chairman G Madhavan Nair described the successful launch as a historic moment in India’s space programme.

“The launch was perfect and precise. The satellite has been placed in the earth orbit. With this, we have completed the first leg of the mission and it will take 15 days to reach the lunar orbit,” Nair announced in the mission control centre.

Speaking to NDTV, Chief of the Indian space program Madhavan Nair gave details about the moon mission.

NDTV: What will it do sir? Is it carrying human beings?
Madhavan: No. This is actually a totally instrumental system

NDTV: So it is an unmanned satellite?
Dr G Madhavan Nair: Unmanned satellite, and it is mainly, almost like our earth observation satellite. This is going to observe the moon.

NDTV:: So it will essentially map the moon one can say?
Dr G Madhavan Nair: Absolutely. In fact today maps are available for certain specific regions with a lower resolution. Here we have got imaging systems which will give almost 10m resolution. So it will be a precise image of the entire surface.

The rocket that is carrying India’s first unmanned satellite to moon is as high as a 7-storey building and weighs nearly 300 tonnes.

One after the other, four stages of the rocket will ignite taking Chandrayaan higher into space.

The Chandrayaan will first make a few revolutions around the Earth so that it gathers enough momentum to reach the moon.

But it will take several days before it covers the 4 lakh kilometers to reach its destination.

The satellite will be captured by moon’s gravity and initially it will revolve nearly a thousand kilometers from the moon’s surface.

But finally it will move closer to nearly 100 kilometers literally over the moon.

Once that’s done, it will spend the next two years mapping the moon’s surface and sending data to India.

And among the first things it does will be to plant India’s national flag on the moon.

Then as part of its many other challenging objectives the multi-continent mission will begin the most intense search ever undertaken for life giving water on the moon.

“We have designed and built this instrument for Chandrayaan-1 to search for the water ice over the lunar poles and will be most extensive search of this type in history,” said Dr Stewart Nozette, NASA and Lunar Planetary Institute, Houston, USA.

Once scientific data has been gathered by the satellite, sending it back to Earth will be a big challenge.

Digitally talking to the mooncraft will not be easy as the satellite will be almost 4 lakh kilometers away. And to gather the faint signals a dish antenna that weighs 60 tons has been set up at a small village called Bylalu near Bangalore. Part of the hi-tech data centre is still being constructed at the village where labourers sweat it out without even knowing that their efforts are taking India to outer space.
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Posted in Countries, Uncategorized | 3 Comments

Indonesia’s tin islands: blessed or cursed?

Posted on October 21, 2008 by Rashid Faridi

Tin mining on these sleepy islands off Sumatra has brought wealth, but at a price; it is literally eating away at the land.

The scale of the environmental damage on the Bangka-Belitung islands can be most clearly seen from the air, revealing a lunar landscape of craters and hundreds of highly acidic, turquoise lakes created by centuries of largely unregulated tin mining.

Efforts in recent years to control illegal mining on the islands have reverberated thousands of miles away by spooking world markets for tin in global financial centers such as London.
Tin exports from Indonesia, the world’s second-biggest producer after China, have slowed after a government clampdown on illegal mining in Bangka-Belitung, helping make tin one of the best performers on the London Metal Exchange in recent years.

The white metal, widely used in food packaging and to solder electronic products, hit an all-time high of $25,500 a tonne in May. It has halved along with falls in most other metals due to concerns over a global recession.

Indonesia’s government has said it will set an annual tin production quota of 100,000 tonnes from next year in a bid to reduce environmental degradation in the main tin-mining areas.

But the situation on the ground is often murky.

Thousands of small-scale traditional and often illegal mining operations sprung up in the late 1990s when the Asian financial crisis wiped out jobs in other sectors of the economy.

From Papua to Kalimantan, there are many examples of mining damaging Indonesia’s rich natural environment, with the situation often exacerbated by lax policing, poverty and corruption. The explosion in unregulated mining in Bangka helped tin exports soar and prices plummet in 2002 before a crackdown on illegal tin mining and smelting in 2006 spurred a recovery.

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Posted in Countries, earth, Ecosystem, Environment | Leave a comment

Climate Change Behind Increased Tiger Attacks in India

Posted on October 20, 2008 by Rashid Faridi

The number of tiger attacks on people is growing in India’s Sundarban islands as habitat loss and dwindling prey caused by climate change drives them to prowl into villages for food, experts said Monday.

Wildlife experts say endangered tigers in the world’s largest reserve are turning on humans because rising sea levels and coastal erosion are steadily shrinking the tigers’ natural habitat.

The Sundarbans, a 26,000 sq km (10,000 sq mile) area of low-lying swamps on India’s border with Bangladesh, is dotted with hundreds of small islands criss-crossed by water channels.

“In the past six months, seven fishermen were killed in an area called Netidhopani,” Pranabes Sanyal of the World Conservation Union said.

“Owing to global warming, the fragile Sundarbans lost 28 percent of its habitat in the last 40 years. A part of it is the core tiger reserve area from where their prey migrated.”

But as sea levels rise, two islands have already disappeared and others are vulnerable. Wildlife experts say the destruction of the mangroves means the tigers’ most common prey, such as crocodiles, fish and big crabs, is dwindling.

Sundarban villagers pass through tiger territory on boats to fish in the sea, or to collect honey in forest areas.

“Villagers are not supposed to enter a number of islands earmarked as tiger territories, but they seldom follow the rules, get attacked and claim compensation,” Pradip Shukla, a senior forest department official, told Reuters.

Villager Ashutosh Dhali became a local celebrity after television cameras captured him being attacked in February.

“We were trying to catch the tiger perched on a tree of our village with tranquilizer shots,” said the 47-year-old villager.

“But it flung on me after falling on a net and bit my loins.”

Once home to 500 tigers in the late 1960s, the Sundarbans may only shelter between 250 and 270 tigers now, wildlife officials say. The Indian Statistical Institute said the number is as low as 75.

Most tigers have been wiped out due to poaching and habitat loss. Authorities said a tiger was killed by poachers in the Sundarbans earlier this month, the latest such killing in India.

The area is the world’s largest mangrove reserve and one of the most unique ecosystems in South Asia, recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Ullas Karanth, of the Wildlife Conservation Society India, says that the Sundarbans are a poor quality tiger habitat because of low prey densities.

“The tendency to seek alternate prey in the form of livestock — and sometimes humans — might be higher in these tigers,” Karanth said.

As sea levels rise, mangroves have been overexposed to salt water. Many plants have lost their red and green colors and are more like bare twigs, exposing tigers to poachers who hunt them for their skin and bones.

There were about 40,000 tigers in India a century ago. A government census report published this year says the tiger population has fallen to 1,411, down from 3,642 in 2002, largely due to dwindling habitat and poaching.
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Posted in BIODIVERSITY, climate change, Countries, Environment | 1 Comment

Delta

Posted on October 19, 2008 by Rashid Faridi

Nile River Delta, Egypt	High resolution true color satellite image of Nile River Delta, Egypt (Image taken by the MODIS instrument on NASAs Terra satellite on August 23, 2003.)

Nile River Delta, Egypt High resolution true color satellite image of Nile River Delta, Egypt (Image taken by the MODIS instrument on NASA's Terra satellite on August 23, 2003.)

Deltas have long played an important role in human history. These fertile areas where rivers flow into large bodies of water have served as fishing, farming, and living sites. Of the great deltas around the world, perhaps none has had a greater role in civilization than the delta of Egypt’s Nile River. Greek historian Herodotus (c. 484–c. 425 B.C.E.), considered by many as the “Father of History,” studied this great geologic feature. He is credited with coining the term “delta” for this type of landform because its triangular shape reminded him of the Greek letter ∆ (delta).

Colorado RiverDelta
Colorado River Delta

A delta is a body of sediment deposited at the mouth of a river or stream where it enters an ocean or lake. Unlike other landforms affected by running water, a delta is not created primarily by water cutting into or eroding the landscape (erosion is the gradual wearing away of Earth surfaces through the action of wind and water). Water does not tear down a delta; instead, it builds up a delta.

A river creates a delta by laying down sediment or rock debris such as gravel, sand, silt, and clay that it has picked up and carried along its course. Alluvium (pronounced ah-LOO-vee-em) is the general term for sediment deposited by running water. A river’s depth, its width, and its speed determine how much sediment it can carry. The Mississippi River flows at an average surface speed of about 2 miles (3 kilometers) per hour. Yet it drains between 1.2 and 1.8 million square miles (3.1 and 4.6 million square kilometers), which is more than 40 percent of the total area of the continental United States. Over the course of a year, it moves an average of 159 million tons (144 million metric tons) of sediment.

In general, deltas are similar in shape to another type of landform deposited by flowing water, alluvial (pronounced ah-LOO-vee-al) fans.

Found typically in desert and other arid (dry) environments, these fanlike deposits of sediment form where an intermittent, yet rapidly flowing canyon or mountain stream spills out onto a plain or relatively flat valley. An alluvial fan is a landform that forms on land. A delta is a landform that forms in water.

Ganges River Delta, Bangladesh and India

The combined Ganges and Brahmaputra Rivers have formed the largest delta in the world, the Ganges River Delta (sometimes called the Ganges-Brahmaputra Delta). Approximately 220 miles (345 kilometers) wide, the delta covers an area of roughly 40,790 square miles (105,645 square kilometers). Almost 1.1 billion tons (1 billion metric tons) of sediment is discharged from these rivers annually. This has produced the Bengal Fan, a deposit of sediment on the floor of the Bay of Bengal that stretches outward 1,865 miles (3,000 kilometers) in length and 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) in width. In places close to shore, the Bengal Fan measures up to 7.5 miles (12 kilometers) thick.

A glacier at about 22,100 feet (6,735 meters) in the Himalayan Mountains is the source of the Ganges River. The river flows southeast across India to combine with the Brahmaputra in Bangladesh. The Brahmaputra River has its source in Tibet along the northern slope of the Himalayan Mountains. From there, it flows across the Assam Valley of India into Bangladesh. The rising Himalayan Mountains provide much of the sediment load of these two rivers.

In Bangladesh, the rivers join to form the Padma, the main channel to the sea. The united rivers branch into many distributaries, forming the vast and fertile Ganges River Delta. The delta region covers roughly 25 percent of India’s total territory. The delta’s southern portion is covered largely with a swamp forest roughly 6,525 square miles (16,900 square kilometers) in area. Known as the Sunderbans, it is home to the endangered Royal Bengal tiger.
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Posted in Environment, Landforms, water | 3 Comments