Sriharikota- Indo-French oceanographic study satellite ‘SARAL’ and six foreign mini and micro spacecrafts were succesfully launched today by ISRO’s PSLV-C20 rocket from this spaceport.

Indian Space Research Organisation’s(ISRO) workhorse Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle(PSLV) lifted off from the first launch pad of Satish Dhawan Space Centre at around 6 pm at the end of the 59-hour countdown and placed in the orbit the
satellites about 22 minutes later. President Pranab Mukherjee witnessed the launch from the mission control centre here, about 110 km from Chennai. The lift-off was rescheduled to 6.01 pm, a five-minute delay, to avoid probability of collision with space debris, a normal precautionary step in a launch mission, ISRO sources said.

The 410-kg SARAL with payloads — Argos and Altika — from French space agency CNES is meant for study of ocean parameters towards enhancing the understanding of the ocean state conditions. Besides SARAL, two micro-satellites UniBRITE and BRITE from Austria, AAUSAT3 from Denmark and STRaND from United Kingdom as also one micro-satellite (NEOSSat) and one mini-satellite (SAPPHIRE) from Canada were launched by PSLV, which yet again proved its versatality recording its 22nd succesful flight in a row in its 23 missions of which the first one had failed. SARAL was injected first into the space about 18 minutes after the lift-off followed by other satellites in the space of about four minutes.

Chennai: Indian space agency officials are gearing up to make the rocket that would carry seven satellites launch-ready for Feb 25 with a full system check, an official said.

‘After mating the satellites with the rocket – Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle -PSLV-C20- a full test of the rocket and the satellites was done. The rocket at this stage is considered as test condition,’ an official of Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) told IANS.

According to officials, the rocket will progress from testable to launch condition in two days time after necessary connectors are plugged in. Officials said the full vehicle test revealed no deviations and everything is progressing normally for the Feb 25 evening flight.

The launch window will be open Feb 22-25. During the 59-hour countdown, the systems will be checked and the rocket will be fuelled.

The Launch Authorisation Board (LAB) is expected to meet soon – two days before the scheduled launch date – to review the situation and give its final nod for the rocket’s flight.

The rocket will blast off from the Sriharikota rocket launch centre, around 80 km from here, carrying seven satellites including an Indo-French collaborative satellite SARAL.

The total weight of all the seven satellites will be around 700 kg.

The Indo-French initiative satellite SARAL (Satellite for ARGOS and ALTIKA), will study the sea surface heights and the data generated will be shared by both the countries.

The other six satellites that PSLV-C20 would sling into orbit are two Canadian satellite NEOSSat (Near Earth Object Space Surveillance Satellite), the world’s first space telescope designed by Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and Sapphire satellite built by MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates (MDA), BRITE and UniBRITE (both Austria), STRaND-1 (Britain) and AAUSAT (Denmark).

Curiously the STRaND-1 (Surrey Training, Research, and Nanosatellite Demonstrator) is the world’s first ‘smart phone satellite’ carrying Google Nexus One phone running on Android operating system.

The four-kg satellite is a Britain mission, jointly developed by the University of Surrey’s Surrey Space Centre (SSC) and Surrey Satellite Technology Limited (SSTL),

The phone will run several applications including collection of data; take pictures of the earth with its camera.

Once all the satellite’s own operating systems have been checked out, key system functions will be transferred to the phone’s components to take control and operate the satellite, said SSTL in its website.

According to CSA, the satellite NEOSSat will detect and track asteroids and satellites circling the globe every 100 minutes and scanning space near the Sun to pin point otherwise almost invisible asteroids.

The satellite will also be useful in tracking resident space objects including space debris.

On the other hand Sapphire will look for resident space objects that include functioning satellites and space debris circling between 6,000 km and 40,000 km above the earth.

The Feb 25 launch is the first of the 10 space missions that ISRO has planned for 2013.

The government told the Parliament last year that ISRO is planning to accomplish 10 space missions in the next one year with eight of them planned by September 2013 and the remaining two by 2013-end.

The missions are three polar satellite launch vehicles, one geosynchronous satellite launch vehicle, two communication satellites, one earth observation (ocean) satellite, one meteorological satellite, one navigation satellite and Mars orbiter.

Berlin: Computer experts from Germany have warned people to be more careful while surfing the internet as malicious programs called “drive-by downloads” can be downloaded unintentionally when users visit “manipulated websites”.

Currently the biggest threat was the so-called “drive-by downloads”, according to the German Federal Association for Information Technology, Telecommunications and New Media or Bitkom.

“Cyber criminals are operating in increasingly sophisticated ways,” said Bitkom president Dieter Kempf.

“Drive-by downloads” are particularly insidious because they are hard to recognise.

Just a visit to a manipulated website is sufficient to make a personal computer vulnerable to attack.

Other important items in a list of internet threats are so-called worms and Trojans, followed by attacks on databases and web applications.

The Hasso Plattner Institute for Software Systems Engineering (HPI) called on internet users to be more careful in their choice of passwords.

Almost one in three people choose a sequence of six or fewer characters.

Short and simple words are also popular, criticised HPI Director Christoph Meinel.

However, these fall far short of providing secure access protection.

Around half of internet users also have the same or a similar password for multiple pages.

The HPI recommends a combination of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers and special characters.

Terms that are in the dictionary, as well as names and dates of birth, should be avoided.

Washington: NASA’s Curiosity rover has become the first spacecraft ever to drill into a Martian rock and collect stone powder samples for further study, NASA said.

The rover, which landed on the red planet in August 2012, used a drill carried at the end of its robotic arm to bore into the rock and collect a sample from its interior.

The rock is believed to hold evidence about long-gone wet environments.

“The most advanced planetary robot ever designed is now a fully operating analytical laboratory on Mars,” said John Grunsfeld, NASA associate administrator for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate.

“This is the biggest milestone accomplishment for the Curiosity team since the sky-crane landing last August.”

Curiosity will soon use its laboratory equipment to analyse rock powder collected by the drill.

Small portions of the sample will be processed by the rover’s Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin) instrument and the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument.

Curiosity landed safely in the Gale Crater for a two-year mission to determine if life exists now or has in the past, to characterise the climate and geology, and prepare for future human exploration on Mars.

The probe is equipped with 10 science instruments weighting a total of 75 kg for detailed geological, geochemical, atmospheric and climate studies.

It also has instruments to detect possible traces of water and organic compounds.

Meanwhile, NASA said that it had started environmental testing for another Martian mission, Maven (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN).

The aim of the mission, scheduled for launch in November, is to study the Martian upper atmosphere.

During the environmental testing phase, to be held in the Lockheed Martin Space Systems facilities near Denver, the orbiter will undergo a variety of tests that simulate the extreme temperatures, vacuum and vibration it would experience during the course of the mission.

In August, the spacecraft is scheduled to be taken to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, where it will undergo final preparations for launch.

Maven, approved by NASA in October 2010, is a robotic exploration mission to understand the role that loss of atmospheric gas to space played in changing the Martian climate through time.

It will investigate how much of the Martian atmosphere has been lost over time.

Moscow: Russia will launch a robotic lunar station in 2015, a top official said Tuesday.

Federal space agency Roscosmos chief Vladimir Popovkin said the Luna-Glob will lift off from the Vostochny space port in Russia’s far east after several test launches.

Luna-Glob is the first of four missions planned before the creation of a fully robotic lunar base scheduled for after 2015.

The orbiter will have a payload of 120 kg, including equipment for astrophysics experiments, dust monitors, and plasma sensors to study ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays.

The moon exploration project is part of the federal space programme dating back to the late 1990s.

It was put on hold due to financial restrictions and resurrected several years later.

Initially scheduled for launch in 2012, the mission has been postponed twice, first to 2010 and then to 2014.

This past August Roscosmos announced a 10-million ruble ($300,000) tender to develop a blueprint of a heavy rocket carrier that would be capable of carrying manned spacecraft to the moon. The project is to be completed by May 31, 2013.

Popovkin previously said the country’s planned manned spacecraft capable of flights to the moon will not fly until 2018.

Russia’s space programme suffered a slew of setbacks in recent years, most of them blamed on faulty hardware.

The most recent mishap took place last December, when a botched launch of the Yamal-402 telecoms satellite led to the depletion of its fuel supply, shortening its orbit lifetime.

In November 2011, Russia launched the Phobos-Grunt probe, its most ambitious planetary mission in decades, designed to bring back rock and soil samples from the Martian moon Phobos.

However, the probe got stuck in Earth’s orbit after its engines failed to put it on course for the Red Planet.

The doomed probe crashed in the Pacific Ocean last January after two months in orbit.

The setbacks resulted in a reshuffle at the Federal Space Agency in 2011.

Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, who oversees defence and space industries, announced late last year a switch to a holding-based model for the industry, which he said would be implemented by March.

Kannur: A team of Indian researchers, led by Dr Sathees C Raghavan of the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, have identified a molecule which they claim will revolutionise the cure for cancer.

The molecule has been named after “Sathees as SCR7″ and a detailed account of it has been carried in the international scientific journal “Cell.”

“The discovery could be a major step in improvement of the existing regimens for cancer treatment,” Sathees, an Assistant Professor of IISc, told reporters here yesterday.

“We hope that this discovery represents a milestone in development of new generation drugs to treat cancer,” Sathees, who hails from Kannur district in Kerala, said.

Scientists world over believe that the double-strand break (DSB) of DNA is one of the most lethal form of DNA damage, resulting in drastic consequences such as genome instability, and cancer.

DSB is primarily repaired by two pathways, homogeneous recombination and non-homogeneous end joining, which was considered as a major route for the repair of DSBs in humans, he said.

The inhibitor SCR7 targets non-homogeneous end joining and offers a strategy towards the treatment of cancer, he said.

“In our extensive scientific investigation carried out at IISc-Bangalore, we have successfully reported that SCR7 prolonged survival by either inducing tumour regression or inhibiting tumour growth in three out of the four tumour mice models tested”, he said.

When co-administered with the DSB-inducing treatment modalities such as radiation or chemotherapeutic agents, SCR7 could prove effective even on unresponsive tumours.

The team that made the discovery included researchers from IBAB, Bangalore, KLE College of Pharmacy, Bangalore and ACTREC, Mumbai.

Kolkata: A centre of excellence specialising in reading space weather conditions to help air traffic on polar routes would come up here by the middle of this year, the first of its kind in the country.

“It will be a centre of excellence in space sciences. The centres main thrust will be on areas of space weather especially weather in the solar system and gravitational physics,” its coordinator, scientist Dibyendu Nandi told PTI here.

Besides air traffic on polar routes, the centre would help in the functioning of GPS networks and mobile satellites placed in space.

Nandi said coronal mass ejections (CME) and solar flares were two kinds of storms originating from the sun which exposed flights to immense amounts of radiation over polar regions.

Several commercial flights from south Asia, Europe and north America flew over the polar regions to cut short time and distance.

Nandi said if the weather in the solar system was not good it would impact the functioning of satellites, which in turn would have an adverse effect on the GPS system and mobile networks.

The centre, approved by the Union HRD ministry, would come up at the Indian Institute of Science, Education and Research (IISER) campus. The ministry has sanctioned Rs four crore for it.

“If we have prior information about a storm originating in the solar system or space, or any other changes in space weather, we will inform the civil aviation department about it so that they inform different airlines about the hazards of flying in polar or high altitudes,” Nandi said.

“We will also inform the telecommunication department about changes in space weather so that they can safeguard their satellites in space. If you are aware of a storm in space then you can at least take safeguards which will in turn increase the longevity of satellites,” he said.

Nandi said the centre would offer its readings free initially to the civil aviation and telecommunication department and later commercially.

According to Nandi, one of the suspected reasons behind the Chandrayan mission falling short of its expected lifespan by one year was technical problems which arose from radiation from storms originating in space.

“It is suspected that very high radiation in space due to changes in space weather damaged Chandrayan and was one of the main reasons behind the mission ending in 2009,” he said.

The centre would also work in field of gravitational physics in terms of analysing data, he added.

Nandi, also involved in Indias first solar mission ‘Aditya’ slated to be launched in 2016, said the space weather reading center would help analyse the data for it.

The centre would also offer PhD programs to students interested in space sciences.