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The week that passed marked the 54th anniversary of both the launch and landing of the Apollo 11 mission, the NASA mission that put humans on the Moon for the first time. In the same week, ISRO’s Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft went through multiple orbit-raising manoeuvres as it made its way to the Moon, just as the Indian space agency test-fired the propulsion module for the planned Gaganyaan mission.
The United Nations designated July 20 as International Moon Day to celebrate the anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission. That is the date when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped on the surface of the Moon, in an achievement that represented the pinnacle of human ingenuity, inspiring generations of space explorers and scientists to reach for the stars.
While the 20th century marked the intense space race between the United States and the Soviet Union, the 21st century saw the introduction of two major entrants into that race–China and India. Three of those countries have already made a soft-landing on the Moon while India is attempting the same with the Chandrayaan-3 mission. If it succeeds, India would be the first nation in the world to land a probe on the Moon’s south pole.
But India’s ambitions extend way past uncrewed missions to space—the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is preparing for the Gaganyaan mission, which will be the country’s first crewed space exploration mission when it launches.
ISRO said it tested the Gaganyaan mission’s service module’s propulsion system by firing its 21 thrusters for 250 seconds on Wednesday. The latest is part of the second phase of tests for the service module and is the first time that all 21 thrusters are being tested at once, according to the space agency.
The Gaganyaan mission is poised to showcase India’s human spaceflight capabilities by sending a trio of astronauts on a 3-day journey to a 400-kilometre altitude above Earth. While the LVM3 (Launch Vehicle Mark 3) will launch the groundbreaking mission from Earth, the service module will handle many critical tasks like performing orbit injection, circularisation, on-orbit control, and de-boost manoeuvring.
For a moment, let’s go to a placefarther away from Earth than the Moon ever does. Very far away. In fact, it is very close to the Sun. Mercury. The BepiColombo spacecraft made its first close flyby near the burning-hot planet on October 1, 2021. The spacecraft approached Mercury from the night side of the northern hemisphere and made a close approach in the morning side of the southern hemisphere.
Using the observations made by the spacecraft, scientists discovered that electrons from the Sun raining down on the surface of the planet generates X-ray auroras on Mercury.
Back here on Earth, auroras are a result of particles from the Sun crashing into the planet’s charged ionosphere. But Mercury has a very thin atmosphere, meaning that a lot of electrons from solar wind crash onto the surface. A paper published in Nature Communications on the discovery is the first time that the cause of X-ray auroras on the planet has been explained.
And now, we go even further away, to a galaxy 220 million light-years away from the Milky Way— NGC 1277. After observing this galaxy, researchers have concluded that it contains no dark matter, upending astronomers’ understanding of how the universe works.
To understand, let’s first explore what dark matter is. Dark matter is a type of matter that makes up almost 85% of the universe. Since it doesn’t react to things like light or radio waves, it’s hard to see or detect. Scientists have tried many experiments to find dark matter, but none have directly detected it because it just doesn’t interact with anything. That’s why we call it “dark” matter.
How do we know dark matter exists if we can’t see it? Well, we can tell because some galaxies look different than they should if they didn’t have dark matter. Also, since dark matter has mass, it affects the space around it, like bending light. This bending of light tells us that dark matter is there, even though we can’t see it. This is called “gravitational lensing.” Many galaxies do this, so we know dark matter must exist. Essentially, the existence of dark matter is the best explanation for the behaviour of many galaxies.
But a team of scientists have found that the galaxy NGC 1277 does not contain dark matter, or contains very little of it, according to the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias in the Canary Islands in Spain.
This goes against the standard cosmological model, based on which, a galaxy like NGC 1277 should contain anywhere between 10 per cent to 70 per cent dark matter. But observations taken of the galaxy can only account for a maximum 5 per cent of dark matter.
Once confirmed, this discovery would mean that astronomers have to rethink their understanding of how the universe functions.
