Mars Landing

The latest Mars probe, Insight, lands on Mars tonight. The landing is tricky, as the spacecraft negotiates the Martian atmosphere to slow down from 20,000 kmph in space  to 8 kmph to coast to the Martian plain Elysium Planitia in 6.5 tense minutes deploying a supersonic parachute. The space craft carries a heavy load, a burrowing heat probe, and three supersensitive seismographs, whose function is to measure temperatures beneath the crust and to record Marsquakes. Unlike the Curiosity rover, the Insight probe will stay put in one place.  However, all plans are on hold till the spacecraft lands safely. NASA starts a live telecast of the landing at 12.00 midnight  today here
Happy watching.

This blog post is by Neelima Gupte  and Sumathi Rao.

It was a flawless landing. Insight landed, phoned home and sent a picture.  Yay!

Here is the Nasa team viewing the  pic.

And here is the pic itself,  Mars looking like a spotty teenager.

The splotches are dust, they say. We will wait for the good pictures. In all, this is Nasa's  18th landing mission to  Mars, and the 8th successful one. The rest crashed! That should say how tricky it is.
More updates as and when. Bye for now.

The IPA Rahul Basu Memorial Award 2018

The winners of the IPA Rahul Basu Memorial Award have been selected for the period 2016-2018. These are:

Winners:

Dr. Apratim Kaviraj,  Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.
Thesis Title: Conformal Bootstrap: Old and New.

Dr. Ipsita Saha, University of Calcutta, Kolkata
Thesis Title: The study of the physics beyond the SM at the LHC in the light of dark matter searches.

Runners up:

Dr. Rusa Mandal, The Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai and HBNI.
Thesis Title: Rare B Decays as a probe to beyond standard model physics.

Dr. Taushif Ahmed,  The Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai and HBNI.
Thesis Title: QCD Radiative Corrections to Higgs Physics.

The award ceremony will be held as a part of the DAE symposium on High Energy Physics, 10 - 14th December, 2018 in Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.   The winners will be given a cash prize of Rs. 25,000/- each and a citation. The runners up will be presented a citation.
Congratulations to the awardees.

This  blog post is by Neelima Gupte  and Sumathi Rao.

Hawa Hawaii

This  blog post has been long delayed,  not because there was nothing to write,  but there was too much. It was literally a case of sensory overload in a tropical paradise. This was the notionally American archipelago of Hawaii, to be exact,  Lahaina on the island of Maui. The long, tiring journey just fell away at the sound of the ocean outside.  Hawaii was all it was advertised  to be: sun, sand, surf and swaying palms.  Missed the jellyfish, however.

There was, however,  a bit of trouble in paradise: a  rumbling volcano on the next island, and a cyclone approaching.  The sky and the sea changed colour, and surfers were warned out of the water.
Waves washed over the highway,  and all the  traffic jammed (just to  remind us that however tropical the island, this was  still the United States).  It rained on the way to the Iao valley,  but that was good for the waterfalls. The little  hike had to be cancelled unfortunately. The park was closing and it was raining hard. Still, it was clear that the park justified its title:  the Yosemite of the west.

The little town of Lahaina has its own points of interest. The courtroom and the 150 year old Banyan tree  planted in 1873, which was sent by missionaries from India, and is the largest tree in the United States.  Even nicer is the little tree  by the bus stop  which had  leaves inscribed by dozens of bored kids waiting  for the bus. Two more joined the bandwagon.  The little complex behind the bus stop had a movie theater and dozens of  handicraft  shops, to say nothing of  sushi bar, and an Indian restaurant to provide succour for all compatriots in search of Indian vegetarian food (many in number, said the lady at the sushi bar)!

There was a beautiful sunset on the last ride  to the airport and  a red eye flight to mainland U.S.A, San   Francisco to be exact. A drive across the bay with friends of forty years and a lovely day at San Juan Batista, one of the old Spanish missions in   California.  This is the church and the museum which feature prominently in the  Hitchcock movie Vertigo. Observe the mountain lion, and the engineering contraptions. Unfortunately,  the steeple where the climax of the movie is filmed  is a Paramount Studios stage set. A sixteen year old was having her first communion in the church, dressed like a Disney princess. The mission garden was essentially a botanical garden  for  all the local flora, and some truly well tended  roses.  We had to go back and watch the movie of course.

Finally after a lovely 1.3862 days in SF, it was back to Chennai, which also has sun and sand and swaying palms, and hibiscus flowers and banyan trees. Another tropical paradise. The Hawaii crowd wants to visit  and verify  the truth of this statement (working on it guys!)



      

This blog post is by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao.

Marscopter!

It's a bird, it's a plane, no it's a Marscopter!

Those who watch it won't be the Little Green Men. It will just be Houston watching the Mars Rover.
NASA plans to load a little helicopter for exploring the Mars terrain on its next Mars Rover mission scheduled to take off in 2020.  Making the Marscopter work is a serious technological challenge (not that the rest of the mission isn't!). Although the Marscopter is tiny (just 1.8 kg, about half a kg more than standard laptops), the real difficulty lies in making it operate in the low atmospheric density of Mars. The atmosphere of Mars is only one percent that of the earth, so that a craft at the Martian surface encounters an atmospheric density which it would encounter at 100,000 feet  off the surface of the earth. The helicopter needs to be as light as is feasible, as well as strong as is feasible. It took the design team four years to come up with a viable machine that is currently under test in NASA's laboratories.

Here is  today's video from NASA.

And here is  one  for the nerdy engineering types.

The 'copter can survey the Martian terrain far more rapidly than the rovers which can explore about a 100 meters a day. NASA plans to use the 'copter for about five flights, over a period of about ninety days. The chopper is expected to cover a few hundred meters in  ninety seconds. We thought Curiosity was a hard act to top, but this one bids fair to outdo it. We wonder what they will call this one. Cat? That would be a killer!


This blog post by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao.

Rahul Basu 04/03/1956-05/03/2011

I proudly told the crowd  that I knew you,
They see your picture in all works of mine.
They come and ask me, `Who is he?'
I know not how to answer them. I say, 'Indeed, it is hard to tell.'
They leave disdainfully and blame me,
And you sit there smiling.

I put my tales of you into lasting songs,
The secret gushes out from my heart.
They come and ask me, `Tell us what they mean.'
I know not how to answer them.
I say, `Ah, who knows what they mean!'
They smile and go away in utter scorn.
And you sit there smiling.

`Sit smiling',  Rabindranath Tagore.

 This post by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao.

The Chandrasekhar Lectures

 Last month was a month with an unexpected  treat,  the pleasure of attending the Chandrasekhar lectures  by the distinguished physicist K.R. Sreenivasan, at the International  Centre for Theoretical Sciences in Bangalore,  which is currently celebrating a decade  of existence, and of hosting stimulating programs high intellectual quality. Prof. Sreenivasan gave a beautiful set of three lectures on Chandrasekhar's personality, work, and Prof. Sreenivasan's own seminal work on turbulence and its scaling laws.

The most interesting part of the lecture was Sreeni's take on the inner sadness of  Chandrasekhar's later years. Someone commented that the huge gap between Chandrasekhar's upbringing and  surroundings contributed to his isolation, in addition to his well known controversies with Eddington and others. Various University of Chicago alumni reminisced  about how he always kept track of  Indian students, even if he didn't really know how to interact with them,  and  didn't like them succumbing to the lure of what he termed 'fashionable physics' (i.e. various forms of quantum field theory). More down to earth forms of physics, like condensed matter physics, did meet with his approval.

Interestingly, on an occasion when Chandrasekhar had visited IIT Madras, many years ago, a student asked him what advice he would give those who are starting on their careers. Chandrasekhar said his advice was, `You have to work all your life. If you actually work all your life, at the end of your career, I assure you, your work will amount to something'. 

It was all the more appropriate that the speaker at the Chandrasekhar lectures was  Prof. Sreenivasan,  indisputably someone who had worked all his life, and with important contributions in every phase of his life, and that the occasion was his 70th birthday. We take this opportunity to raise a toast to his achievements, and to thank him for his leadership of, and unstinting support to the nonlinear dynamics community over the years.


This blog post is by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao.