India on the moon, screw you Br*****

Towards the start of the year 2008, India announced that she is planning to launch an unmanned mission to the moon. Following this, India would be the third Asian nation to launch a probe to orbit the Moon. The launch date for Chandrayaan-1 was delayed from April 9, 2008 to October 22, 2008 from the Satish Dhawan Space Center.

As earlier planned, the Indian lunar probe will also feature an Indian-made Moon impact probe (MIP) while the orbiter maps the surface from 62-miles above during its planned 2-year mission. The spacecraft will have 11 scientific instruments with five from India and six from abroad.

Chandrayaan-2, a follow-on mission expected to be launched around 2011-12, will have a soft lander carrying a robotic rover.

Japan and China have spacecraft probes that have just recently gone into lunar orbit. India plans to expand to a human space program.

Some facts about Chandrayaan (Source - ISRO)

• Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft was launched from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre, SHAR, Sriharikota by PSLV-XL (PSLV-C11) on 22 October 2008 at 06:22 hrs IST in an highly elliptical initial orbit (IO) with perigee (nearest point to the Earth) of 255 km and an apogee (farthest point from the Earth) of 22,860 km, inclined at an angle of 17.9 deg to the equator. In this initial orbit, Chandrayaan orbited the Earth once in about six and a half hours.
  


• Subsequently, the spacecraft's Liquid Apogee Motor (LAM) firing was done on 23 October at 09:00 hrs IST, when the spacecraft was near perigee, to raise the apogee to 37,900 km while the perigee to 305 km. The spacecraft took eleven hours to go round the Earth once.
  


• The orbit was further raised to 336 km x 74,715 km on 25 October at 05:48 hrs IST. In this orbit, spacecraft took about twenty-five and a half hours to orbit the Earth once.
  


• The LAM was fired again on 26 October at 07:08 hrs IST to take the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft to extremely high elliptical orbit with apogee 164,600 km and perigee at 348 km. Chandrayaan-1 took about 73 hours to go round the Earth once.
  


• On 29 October, orbit raising was carried out at 07:38 hrs IST to raise the apogee to 267,000 km and perigee to 465 km. Chandrayaan’s present orbit extends more than half the way to moon and takes about six days to orbit the Earth.
  


• On 4 November at 04:56 hrs IST, Chandrayaan entered the Lunar Transfer Trajectory with an apogee of 380,000 km.
  


• On 8 November at 16:51 hrs IST, the spacecraft’s Liquid engine was fired to reduce its velocity to insert the spacecraft in the lunar orbit (LOI) and enable lunar gravity to capture it. As a result, the spacecraft was in an elliptical orbit with periselene (nearest point to the moon) of 504 km and aposelene (farthest point from the moon) of 7,502 km.
  


• The first orbit reduction manoeuvre was carried out successfully on 9 November at 20:03 hrs IST. Thus the spacecraft was in lunar orbit with 200 km periselene. The aposelene remains unchanged (i.e 7,502 km).
  


• After careful and detailed observation, a series of three orbit reduction manoeuvres were successfully carried out and the spacecraft’s orbit was reduced to its intended operational 100 km circular polar orbit on November 12.
  


• On 14 November at 20:06 hrs IST, the Moon Impact Probe (MIP) was ejected from the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft and hard landed on the lunar surface near the South Polar Region at 20:31 hrs IST after 25 minutes journey. It placed the Indian tricolour, which was pasted on the sides of MIP on the Moon.
  


• Currently, the scientific instruments/payloads are being commissioned sequentially and exploration of Moon with the array of onboard instruments have begun.

More details on the official ISRO site.

Women in one million BC

If women looked ike this in One Million B.C., Where the hell did we go wrong!!!

The Montrose trip

It’s been really long since I wrote anything, again. I’ll start off this time around with my Greenhands course in Montrose. This course has a very vivid and entertaining history behind it, at least for Nakul (my colleague) and me. This course is compulsory for people who come on any rigs working for the service company, and thus was a requirement; otherwise we’ll be making a lot of people very unhappy.

So this course was for 5-days in the Petrofac facilities in Montrose, a small town around 40 miles south of Aberdeen. I was pretty excited to go to Montrose because that was the first trip that I’d be going to since I came to Aberdeen two and a half months back (not counting my trip to Netherlands). And since it was just 40 miles from Aberdeen, taking the train everyday for those 5 days was the best option, as the train took 40 mins. for the trip. So a pretty decent excursion I’d say.

The train journey was pretty nice. I took the unreserved seats, which are similar to the ones in the non-reserved bogeys in second class in India. But the trains weren’t anything like back at home. I luckily managed to find a seat, which was reserved for handicapped people, and so had a nice leg space to it; and that was my seat for the whole week while travelling from Aberdeen to Montrose. It was the case on the return journey also. The train was pretty fine itself. There was free wi-fi, a café, a bar and a cart carrying snacks (similar to the ones on a flight).

Montrose itself was no big deal as a town. And since I was not hoping for it to be something great (after looking at Aberdeen), it was no surprise for me. The course as a whole, what I learnt when I reached there, was totally useless, in a way. But I wasn’t complaining. A week’s holiday from work to go to a course in another town that is not that useful, I find it to be a nice equation.

I managed to find quite a few characters in the course with me. There were 12 people in all, out of which me and another guy were the only ones who were already in the oil industry. The rest of them were mostly shifting careers; and since this course was compulsory for people, they were bound to be there. There was this guy in class, forgot his name though, who had an amazing story as to why he was joining the industry. This guy is 42-43 years old, parents passed away in a span of 3 months in the past 6 months, wife left him, was canned from work after working in a distillery as a whisky blender for 25 years, and now just wanted to start fresh in life. Interesting. Another guy, the other guy in the oil industry, was another character in his own. He was an Arab from Oxydental, again don’t remember his name, was formerly in Qatar Petroleum, and was doing this course as part of his new job profile in the company. He acted like he was the boss of the world, a bit snobby, a bit of a superiority complex, God knows for what reason. By his behaviour, and his body structure, he looked exactly like Carlton Banks from Fresh Price of Belair. So that was pretty funny, the way he acted around.

On the whole at least I had a nice week, and I managed to see some of the Scottish coastline, which is pretty good. Plus I got some great pictures on the trip. So that was nice.