Indian Flag on the Moon

It is a glorious moment for Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) and India, for it has become the 4th country to have landed on the moon. Today, just hours back Chandrayaan-1's Moon Impact Probe (MIP) landed on the moon's surface and carries the Indian flag to the moon's surface.

India becomes the fourth country along with US, Russia and European Union (not really a country ;-)) to reach the surface of the moon. The 35-kg MIP hit the moon's surface at 21:31hrs after it was lauched 25mins earlier from Chandrayaan-1, which is currently orbitting the moon and sending images of the moon's surface to ISRO. The MIP is one of the 11 probe that Chandrayaan-1 is carrying for various exploration activities on the moon. According to ISRO officials, the MIP landing was perfect and worked exactly as planned.

After the landing, ISRO chairman G Madhavan Nair said, "The Moon was favourable to us. We have travelled all the way to the Moon. We have given Moon to India". It is indeed one of the greatest scientific achievements in India's history and everyone is elated...

I'm not quite sure how India received the moon with this mission, as quoted by the elated chief. I thought the white disk that I've been looking at since childhood was the moon ;-) and its been in view from India for centuries!! Next time when I look through a telescope on the moon's surface, I'll try to find the Indian flag!! Anyways, now we are all waiting for India's manned mission to the moon which has become somewhat of a race with China's moon mission.

Modern CS Scientists: They Brought Us Here (PIC)

Found this picture in my inbox today and thought would be useful to post it to my blog. Look at the popular CS scientists... I think there could have been a few more who have made exceptional contribution to the field of computing

TIFR scientists create Bose-Einstein Condensate

Researchers at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai-India have created Bose-Einstein Condensate for the first-time in India. Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC) is referred to as the 5th state of matter and was first proposed by India scientist Satyendranath Bose and later worked on by Albert Einstein in 1925. The irony of this latest creation in someway is that although it was proposed by an Indian scientist, it took about 82years to be practically demonstrated in India. Scientists Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman from the University of Colorado at Boulder NIST created the BEC for the first time in 1995 and were awarded the Nobel prize for physics in 2001 with scientist of MIT.

But this great achievement in India is no mean task. Very few researchers from around the world have been able to create it. The Phd. students Saptarishi Chaudhury (my first name rocks!!) and Sanjunkta Roy along with Prof. CS Unnikrishnan were involved in this development and we should congratulate them that Satyendranath Bose's soul would be very proud of them today. Some of their initial research papers are as old as 2005 and shows the amount of hard work they have done to achieve this extraordinary feat.
Check out their personal homepages (by clicking on their names above) for their personal research and resumes. Their team page is here

From their earlier abstract on MOT:

Design, construction and characterization of a source of intense, cold and tunable neutral atomic beam will be discussed. These atoms are then captured and further cooled in a high-density Magneto-Optical trap (MOT), making the system a favourable starting point for production of Bose-Einstein condensate in an all optical dipole trap. In this talk we shall present the general principles and experimental techniques to trap and cool tens of billions of atoms to micro-Kelvin temperature using appropriate laser light and magnetic field. At these ultra-low temperatures, several routes to precision experiments using neutral atoms open up. For example, novel experiments to study quantum electrodynamics of atoms strongly coupled to cavities are possible and atom-surface and atom-cavity interactions can be studied in a near ideal condition. As a specific example, we shall discuss behaviour of cold atoms moving through a high-finesse cavity. Quantum degeneracy and atomic Bose-Einstein condensates are produced starting from a cloud of ultra-cold atoms in a MOT. These cold atoms can also be trapped in a micro-optical lattice, making it possible to do quantum measurements on single atom. This talk is meant to be a general introduction to the topic of Laser Cooling and Trapping of Neutral Atoms along with a brief description of a state-of-the-art experimental set-up built here facilitating high precision experiments.

The scientists used lasers to cool atoms of Rubidium to temperature nearing absolute zero to create the BEC. The result is a superconductive material which in the future may be applied to fields of nanotechnology. Read here, the press release given to Press Trust Of India