I have been thinking about Pressure (the pressures of life kind of pressure) and how that helps us work. Generally there is a tendency of people to think that Pain, Pressure, Hurt, Sickness are all 'BAD' things. I think that is a very vain sort of thinking, when a person does not want to challenge himself anything that is a little difficult to understand becomes BAD or avoidable.
All these aspects are very much part of life. Lately I was thinking about pressure and I saw a cycle within me. Pressure is mechanism to get things done, to become active and DO something than just sitting in a very passive state of inactivity.
When there is a sense of achievement the pressure slackens for sometime, but soon after a little worry starts. This worry builds up pressure and it again incites action. Basically pressure keeps us moving forward.
How well a person does is very closely related to how he can manage pressure. Can he keep his head, and stick to what he wants to do and excel at that, or does he get side tracked and end up doing bad work? Whichever way it is, Pressure will always be pushing us....
Its like Gravity, and an am
azing example of what I am saying can be found in astronomy. In order to get away from Earth's gravity any space craft has to put in massive effort and its a pain how much fuel needs to be utilized to just push the craft away from Earth and into space.
There is a thing called Gravity assist - many missions have used the gravity pull of planets to save fuel and travel light! (Read more)
Similarly while initially we seem to think that "pressure aargghhhh we need to get away from it" its only until we understand how it works.
So its time to keep aside complaining or viewing Pressure as a negative thing and lets embrace it as it is a force that helps us achieve and aspire. This will also help us manage it better and not get freaked out by all the pressure around us.
First there was NASA, they sent out humans in the Big, Empty, Dark of Space. Back on Earth a few geeks made a contraption called Twitter to exchange information, these information snippets were called Tweets.
Now there is the first tweet from the humans in the Big, Empty, Dark of Space :)
So finally NASA gets on the social media bandwagon FULL ON, they have given access to real time web for personal use to the astronauts in space. I think they could have done this before but now in social media there is publicity, hype and money! A way to garner public support!
Read more about NASA on social media.
NASA's LCross mission is gonna do its job tomorrow. For those who came in late, its Job is to Bomb the Moon! Yes that is what I said. The spacecraft is going to crash into the Moon. The explosion will be recorded and studied in a way that will give NASA an idea about whether there is frozen water there.
(If you think we should have protested about such destruction of our only natural satellite then you should have responded to my last blog post where I let my sentiments against this be let known.)
The impact is scheduled for approx 7.30 am EDT which is about 5.00 pm IST. So tomorrow evening if you have an internet connection you can follow the impact in many ways.
You can watch it live here or
Follow this mission on Twitter and Facebook.
Can't wait for the impact? Watch the lift off and other videos!
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I have been reading much about Chandrayaan being a failure, this is really not true! Chandrayaan was more than 90% successful and in a space mission this cannot really be called a failure. I sent out a tweet about this and many people agreed with me. I have listed out some of the initial failures that US faced. They are an interesting read and should provides insight about how tricky this space technology is.
Mission Ranger
After President Kennedy asked NASA to put a man on the Moon in 10 years, one of the first missions towards this was the Ranger mission.
AIM: to crash land on a particular region of the Moon, clicking and transmitting snaps until impact. The scientists needed to know whether
1. Moon's surface was solid where a spacecraft could land or was it like dusty where anything heavy would sink, or maybe it was a bog of quicksand (or maybe made of cheese).
2. This would be one of the first times that a probe would orbit another celestial body and transmit data, so would this mechanism work?
Failure: Rangers 1 to 6 all failed!! 6 missions lost! Problems ranged from coding error to power supply damage to cameras not switching on! This was 4 years lost without much gain, because most of these failures were too small to learn anything from! Like a malfunction or a random failure/damage.
Mission Mariner
This was US's first attempt to an interplanetary probe.
Aim: Mariner 1 was to go to Venus and gather data.
Failure: On lift off, in a few minutes it exploded and the craft was incinerated. Later the failure was analyzed and fault was found to be in the programming. A TYPO had been made where instead of a comma(,) the guy put a period (.)! (Another version says it was lack of a hyphen (-) at one place in the code) Due to its minuteness none of the checks and tests showed the error.
Success!
Neither of these missions were prophetic, cause the next missions Ranger 7 and Mariner 2 were big successes! They did what they had to, and gave scientists much needed insight.
So while Chandrayaan may have stopped responding the mission is really not a failure, because it was majorly successful and that is Successful! :)
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Spending time with my camera (gifted by my bro for Raksha Bandhan :D) Sony Cybershot
Chand chipaa baadal mein...
Learnt to copyright the images on Gimp (good tutorial). Am still experimenting with various watermarks :)
Maggi tastemakers which are lying in my fridge due to my Maggi recipes. My brother says he will make Maggi with double the tastemaker powder :D He is not a health freak nor into Yoga tch tch...
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Today there was a solar eclipse, early in the morning. It is the longest solar eclipse of the 21st century lasting for more than 6 minutes. The reason for this is that the Sun is furthest from the Earth hence smaller while the Moon is closest to the Earth hence bigger. So a bigger Moon hides a smaller Sun... making it an unusually long eclipse.
I came to know about it from my coworkers who had to ask for a late day in office cause it was inauspicious for them to have bath or cook until the eclipse got over.
It was an unusual day also because I woke up at 4.45 am!! A friend picked me up on his mobike and we went to the planetarium of Mumbai called Nehru Planetarium, while I expected at least one telescope to be there for viewing, there weren't any.
This could also be due to the fact that the sky was totally clouded, moreover the rising sun would not be visible from the planetarium due to buildings surrounding it.... So they had made some arrangement of a screen to view the eclipse on the web I presumed. However the screen unbelievably just remained stuck to a starry night background software tab all along that to, to one particularly dull image of a crescent moon or partly eclipsed sun, god knows!
Large number of media people gathered there asking people to give interviews, how they felt etc...Moreover about 5 camera for video shooting were kept ready in front of the screen, the screen which never sparked to life at all. :D
It was funny! Not much to be expected from Nehru Planetarium which is not as bad as the Mumbai aquarium (Taraporewala) but really it is so technologically backwards!
The adventure really began when we left the musty planetarium and went to the opposite Nehru centre and climbed some ladders to its 3 tiered terraces. Did not see the Sun at all.. in fact I don't think there was any darkening of the sky either. Probably due to the high reflectivity of the rain clouds.
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Couple of days back, 'Mars' was trending on twitter (yes its a twitter story again). I checked what people were tweeting and it was a cool NASA campaign where I get to send my name to Mars... Ooooh.
Send your Name to Mars!
In fact they even go a large way in making the experience get an extra Ooomph.. by showing the participation map, where we can see how many people participated from a particular company... India isn't too high
Moreover they give a cool certificate ...
demgy5a7vu
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So it seems my two interests astronomy and social media are converging. Saying it differently NASA is cashing on with social media!!
It all started out with a couple of astronauts tweeting, and huge number of tweeple following them.
Astro_Mike Astro_127
Astronaut Mike Massimino sent out the first tweet from space apparently! Every one was totally excited.. will we learn this in future text books? Will it be as famous as Neil Armstrong's "A small step for man, one giant leap for mankind"??
Of course it was a little kill joy when news came out that the tweet had been routed through ground personnel. As in someone else tweeted his words from Earth itself :D
So coming back to NASA, they are launching a LCROSS mission to bombard the moon. I personally find the idea of creating an explosion on Moon to find out if it has water ridiculous. I mean this is a place that no one has really seen, blasting it is NOT COOL.
Moreover, if any other nation wanted to do this, would US let it happen, without any hassles?? As long it is the US that is leading, they can do whatever.
Bomb the MOON?? OK. After all it is the American space agency.
Coming back to point, this LCROSS mission is going to have live tweeting by the spacecraft it seems (ha-ha), facebook and live coverage never before seen on NASA TV, also a twitpic account for exclusive snaps! Cool?
Well I wish I was more excited about this mission. :x
BTW NASA is also on twitter... http://twitter.com/nasa
source for some stuff
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Sky and Telescope is my favourite site, it has one of the most easily usable ‘today’s night’ sky charts that I have come across.
So this is the kooky story I promised you....
I once read a story in a magazine. It was a sci-fi story where in, a top honcho at NASA has a visit from his mother in law at his office. Even though the meeting had been fixed earlier, when she arrived there was tension and chaos in the office. The reason for this was that, the astronauts sent sometime ago, had reached Pluto!
Now the Big problem facing them was that sending a signal from Earth to Pluto would take well some hours. And then they would have to wait for a reply for another few hours.
Now the window when Earth and Pluto were aligned so as to be able to communicate was very small just a few hours!
After a lot of coaxing the top guy confided with his mother in law about the problem. And the mother in law just smiled and said "Every woman knows what the fastest way to communicate is, you just have to keep on talking! That's how women seem to know everything about every woman on the block! They just keep talking to each other when they meet. That way they say the most and get the most information!!"
The NASA guy just stared at her, cause she had just given him a solution! Both the satellites when aligned would just have to keep relaying info! The Pluto guys could have the answers to the questions from Earth ready the next time. But still in the mean time they would just relay important information to Earth, and most would be gained in that short time.
At my year at a Yoga Center as a full-time volunteer, I came across the Monk's Grapevine, of all the people staying there the Monks gossiped the most, they are also the main admin people. And I realised how great it would be if these people would actually utilize this information from gossiping for better administration of the place!
The point I am trying to make here is that gossip can be a very powerful tool of communications and it could be harnessed for better admin, better management, creating better informed people!
WARNING: This theory is untried and untested (that is why it is a kooky story :D)
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