Monday, November 26, 2018

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.

Tuesday, November 13, 2018

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.