Indian Space Research Organisation hopes tricolour on moon by October 28

Indian Space Research Organisation scientists are sitting pretty, preparations done and fingers crossed. The rocket PSLV-C11 is ready, the satellite Chandrayaan 1 is ready as well, and the country is waiting for the launch of what will be the first Indian step towards the moon and beyond.

Scientists are confident they will be able to launch India’s first mission to the moon — mainly an orbiter but also a 30-kg moon impact probe piggyback satellite — that is expected to hit the moon’s surface and unfurl the Indian flag between October 22 and 28. The only worry is that the north-eastern monsoon is expected to be more severe than usual. But Isro chairman Madhavan Nair was on Monday gung-ho about India’s entry into the elite club of space-faring nations.

Speaking exclusively to this newspaper, Dr Nair called upon the nation’s scientific community to rise to the opportunity and come up with innovative science studies by going to Venus, Mars, and other planets and their satellites in the solar system.

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Collision course

Falling A collision with an unforeseen asteroid or an invasion from Alpha Centauri, the world will probab1y not end on Wednesday, but a lot of people will be holding their breath anyway.

At roughly 12.30 pm Indian time, scientists at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, say they will try to send the first beam of protons around a 27-km-long racetrack known as the Large Hadron Collider, 300 feet underneath the Swiss-French border.

And a generation of physicists, watching from control rooms and auditoriums on the scene, on Webcasts at webcast.cern.ch or on Eurovision will meet their destiny.

The collide14 years and $8 billion in the making, is the most expensive scientific experiment to date and is designed to accelerate protons to energies of 7 trillion electron volts and smash them together.

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Scientists learn what makes Northern Lights flare

The multicolored aurora borealis and aurora australis -- the Northern Lights and Southern Lights -- represent some of Earth's most dazzling natural displays.

Now scientists using data from five NASA satellites have learned what causes frequent auroral flare-ups that make this green, red and purple light show that shimmers above Earth's northernmost and southernmost regions even more spectacular.

Writing in the journal Science, the scientists said on Thursday that explosions of magnetic energy occurring a third of the way between Earth and the moon drive the sudden brightening of the Northern Lights and Southern Lights.

There had been debate among scientists dating back decades about what triggers these auroral flare-ups.

The findings from the THEMIS satellites and a network of 20 ground observatories in Canada and Alaska confirmed that it is due to a process called "magnetic reconnection." THEMIS stands for Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms mission.

Auroral displays are associated with the solar wind -- electrically charged particles continuously spewing outward from the sun. Earth's magnetic field lines reach far out into space as they store energy from the solar wind.

The researchers said that as two magnetic field lines come close together due to the storage of energy from the sun, a critical limit is reached and the lines reconnect, causing magnetic energy to be turned into kinetic energy and heat. The release of this energy sparks the auroral flare-ups.

"We showed that the process begins far from Earth first and propagates Earthward later," said Vassilis Angelopoulos of the University of California at Los Angeles, who led the research.

The moon is located about 240,000 miles from Earth, and this process is occurring roughly 80,000 miles from Earth.

The same mechanism causing the auroral brightening also can cause problems for satellites, power grids and communications systems on Earth and could endanger astronauts in space, the researchers said.

Discovery may lead to quake early-warning system

Scientists working at California's San Andreas Fault have detected subtle geological changes occurring hours before an earthquake that could enable them to develop an early-warning system aimed at saving lives.

Their instruments detected geological changes most likely caused by tiny fractures forming in the rock ahead of an impending earthquake due to stress in the Earth's crust, according to seismologist Paul Silver of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, one of the researchers.

"It's the opening up of cracks before an earthquake," Silver said in a telephone interview.

The research, published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, was conducted using wells dug 0.6 miles deep into the quake-prone fault at Parkfield, California.

Their equipment generated and recorded seismic waves before, during and after two small quakes, allowing them to observe these small, predictive geological changes.

In the first case, the geological signals occurred 10 hours before a magnitude 3 quake in December 2005. The same sort of signals also occurred two hours before a magnitude 1 quake that happened five days later, the researchers said.

"We are very encouraged by these observations, and we are planning for more experiments to confirm whether these changes are part of the general physical processes before an earthquake," seismologist Fenglin Niu of Rice University in Houston said in a telephone interview.

EVACUATIONS?

Scientists have made strides in understanding earthquakes, but finding changes in the Earth's crust that could allow for an advance prediction has remained difficult.

Current earthquake warning systems provide at best a few seconds notice before an earthquake strikes.

The findings were published just two months after a powerful earthquake in China. The May 12 quake in Sichuan province killed about 80,000 people, with many killed when buildings such as schools collapsed.

"To get the point where we have a practical early warning system for earthquakes, that's still a ways off -- 10 years, maybe 20," Silver said.

If more research finds this effect to be pervasive before earthquakes, these findings may make that goal attainable, the researchers said.

"No matter how much time you have, there's something you can do. Even with a few seconds, you can automatically turn off gas valves. You may even be able to get a hard hat on your head or run outside of a building," Silver said.

"But with something on the order of 10 hours, you could perhaps evacuate populations, you could certainly get people out of city centers and areas that are deemed dangerous."