Tag: Science

May was a blockbuster month for Indian space startups as they made a significant impression not just in India but also globally.  Bengaluru based space startup GalaxEye successfully launched Mission Drishti, the world’s first OptoSAR satellite aboard a Falcon 9 by SpaceX from Vandenberg, California. India’s largest privately developed earth observation satellite, Mission Drishti, is...

SpaceX Starship launches are on hold pending an investigation into last week’s test flight. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced on Wednesday (May 27, 2026) that the hour-long spaceflight resulted in a mishap based on the performance of the mega rocket’s first-stage booster. Minutes after Starship blasted off from Texas on May 22, the booster...

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is already ordering landers, rovers and drones for a sprawling moon base, less than two months after the Artemis II’s record-breaking lunar flyaround. The space agency outlined the first phase of its moon base plans on Tuesday (May 26,2026), awarding hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts to four...

Nearly six years after it was launched, India’s second moon mission Chandrayaan-2 continues to provide valuable data on the satellite. In a new finding, scientists have found the possible presence of subsurface ice in lunar south polar regions. These were the findings of scientists from Physical Research Laboratory (PRL) who used observations from the Chandrayaan-2’s...

Aerosols in the air reduced the amount of solar power generated in India by 9.6% in 2023, equivalent to around 15 terawatt-hours (TWh), according to a new analysis published in Nature Sustainability. The same study reported that the global average loss due to the same cause in 2023 was 5.8%. Between 2017 and 2023, pollution-related...

Climate change is making lightning strikes around the world more common and deadlier. Every year, around 24,000 people around the world are killed by such strikes; in India, lightning strikes killed 2,887 people in 2022. There have been petitions to declare this phenomenon a natural disaster in India so that its survivors can access institutional...

An Indian researcher based in Japan has named a newly discovered large structure of galaxies after Manipur’s Loktak Lake, seeking to “immortalise” the northeastern state’s identity in the cosmos. Dr. Ronaldo Laishram, who led an international research team as a postdoctoral researcher at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ), said the structure was studied...

People from Bengaluru should not be allowed to complain about their weather turning hot. The other day, as a namma friend called to express disappointment over their daytime temperatures reaching as high as 33 degrees, I wondered in what Awadhi words should I inform her about the pleasant 42 degrees here in Kanpur. The baked earth, the...

Climate change is not only pushing species to the brink of extinction, it is erasing a vast proportion of the ‘evolutionary history’ of the world’s flowering plants’ — or how these organisms relate to one another on the tree of life, which changes over time. No less than a fifth (21 %) of the world’s...