On earth passing electric currents for just five days in a
primitive atmosphere flask and clear water , turns it into thick brown
goo , containing all the amino acids we need for life.
Could Venus be similar? Its atmosphere , ten times thicker
than earth all made of living organisms? How would be check for it.
I still think Venus will be easier to terraform than Mars and its
twice as near.
excerpt
Chandrayaan-1 successfully enters lunar orbit
Chandrayaan-1, India's first unmanned spacecraft mission to moon,
entered lunar orbit today (November 8, 2008). This is the first time
that an Indian built spacecraft has broken away from the Earth's
gravitational field and reached the moon. This historic event occurred
following the firing of Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft's liquid engine at
16:51 IST for a duration of 817 seconds. The highly complex 'lunar
orbit insertion manoeuvre' was performed from Chandrayaan-1 Spacecraft
Control Centre of ISRO Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network at
Bangalore.
Indian Deep Space Network (IDSN) at Byalalu sup****ted the crucial task
of transmitting commands and continuously monitoring this vital event
with two dish antennas, one measuring 18m and the other 32m.
Chandrayaan-1's liquid engine was fired when the spacecraft passed at
a distance of about 500 km from the moon to reduce its velocity to
enable lunar gravity to capture it into an orbit around the moon. The
spacecraft is now orbiting the moon in an elliptical orbit that p*****
over the polar regions of the moon. The nearest point of this orbit
(periselene) lies at a distance of about 504 km from the moon's
surface while the farthest point (aposelene) lies at about 7502 km.
Chandrayaan-1 takes about 11 hours to go round the moon once in this
orbit.
The performance of all the systems onboard Chandrayaan-1 is normal. In
the coming days, the height of Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft's orbit around
the moon will be carefully reduced in steps to achieve a final polar
orbit of about 100 km height from the moon's surface. Following this,
the Moon Impact Probe (MIP) of the spacecraft will be released to hit
the lunar surface. Later, the other scientific instruments will be
turned ON sequentially leading to the normal phase of the mission.
It may be recalled that Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft was launched on
October 22, 2008 by PSLV-C11 from India's space****t at Satish Dhawan
Space Centre (SDSC) SHAR, Sriharikota. As intended, PSLV placed the
spacecraft in a highly oval shaped orbit with a perigee (nearest point
to Earth) of 255 km and an apogee (farthest point to Earth) of 22,860
km. In the past two weeks, the liquid engine of Chandrayaan-1 has been
successfully fired five times at op****tune moments to increase the
apogee height, first to 37,900 km, then to 74,715 km, later to 164,600
km, after that to 267,000 km and finally to 380,000km, as planned.
During this period, the Terrain Mapping Camera (TMC), one of the
eleven payloads (scientific instruments) of the spacecraft, was
successfully operated twice to take the pictures, first of the Earth,
and then moon
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