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| SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY |
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Towards an Indian manned flight Heat from meat
THIS UNIVERSE
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Towards an Indian manned flight The successful launch of India’s maiden lunar mission Chandrayaan-1 on October 22, besides catapulting India into the elite global space league made up of USA, Russia, Japan, China and the European Space Agency(ESA) which have sent probes to earth’s nearest celestial neighbour, has given a big boost to the ambitious plan of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) to undertake a manned flight by 2015. ISRO Chairman Madhavan Nair has revealed that the biggest challenge involved in realising an Indian manned mission is to build a habitat that is suitable for humans in outer space where extremes of vacuum, radiation and zero gravity conditions prevail and the safe return of the crew. According to the latest Annual Report of the Indian Space Department, India’s manned flight programme envisages the development of a fully autonomous orbital vehicle capable of carrying two or three crew members to around 400-kms low The Indian manned capsule which is expected to weigh up to 4 tonnes is planned to be launched by means of the heavy liftoff GSLV-MK-III space vehicle now under development. The three stage GSLV-MK-III equipped with an upper cryogenic engine stage is capable of placing either a 4 tonne class payload into a geostationary transfer orbit or a 10 tonne class payload into a near earth orbit. As part of the manned mission, an advanced astronaut training facility will be set up by ISRO in collaboration with the Bangalore-based Institute of Aviation Medicine(IAM) which functions under the Indian Air Force (IAF).This facility covering more than 100 acres will be set up on the outskirts of Bangalore. As pointed out by Nair, “this facility will be ready three years before the Indian manned flight slated for 2015”. Nair observed that Bangalore was the unanimous choice for the astronaut training centre due to its presence of space establishments and aerospace industries. “This training centre will equip astronauts to limit their exposure to radiation in outer space” quipped Nair. Among the facilities that would form the part of this centre are a radiation simulation chamber to help astronauts handle radiation from the sun; a centrifuge to enable manoeuvers in space, a zero gravity simulator as well as hardware designed to train astronauts fly their spaceship. Nair has stated that the final nod for this Rs 12,0000-million manned flight programme is awaited from the Government of India. To complement the Bangalore facility, a crew management facility is planned to be set up at Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SDSC), the Indian spaceport in the spindly shaped Sriharikota on India’s eastern coast that would provide last minute training to the astronauts. Further, a third launch pad will be set up at SDSC to support the Indian manned mission. This third launch pad will have facilities such as crew escape module. Currently, SDSC has two launch pads and the Chandrayaan-spacecraft was launched from the second launch pad. Meanwhile, everything going as planned, two Indians will fly onboard a Russian spaceship to the International Space Station (ISS) early next decade. This Russian offer is expected to give an impetus to the Indian manned flight programme. India and Russia have already set up a joint working team to study the finer details of training and flying Indian astronauts. It is envisaged that the selected astronaut candidates will be trained in the Russian Star City and this exercise will help India gain an insight into the intricacies of astronaut training. It was in 1984 that Sq. Ldr. Rakesh Sharma of the IAF became the first Indian cosmonaut after he flew to the Russian Salyut-7 space station onboard the Soyuz-T vehicle under the international space cooperation programme of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. While many technological elements to put together a manned flight are already available, ISRO would need to develop many new and novel technologies to ensure a foolproof life support system, safety, reliability and an escape system for the crew. And in order to perfect the reentry techniques considered crucial for a manned flight, ISRO is planning to carry out three more flights of Space Capsule Recovery Experiment (SRE). In January 2007, ISRO had launched and successfully retrieved its first SRE probe. ISRO believes that India’s manned mission is a crucial step in the direction of the future plans to ISRO to send a man to moon. On its part, ISRO will tap the human expertise, scientific talent, technological infrastructure to the fullest extent to give a push to the Indian manned mission The genesis of the Indian manned mission goes back to November 2006 when around one hundred scientists and researchers hailing from a variety of organisations and specialising in different disciplines, had lent whole-hearted support to ISRO’s manned
flight venture. They, however, had insisted on the need for perfecting safety and reliability systems, taking into account the human element.
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Heat from meat Various cultures of the world have adopted different plants as their main food crop, or staple. However, there are some societies that eat almost entirely plants, whereas others use a substantial amount of animal-derived foods. For example in India, plants contribute 80 per cent of the dietary protein (cereals and legumes), but in the United States plants provide only 20 per cent of dietary protein. The remaining comes from animals and animal products. The dietary differences have developed among regions, social classes and people of various religious groups. Before humans first practised agriculture, ancient hunter gathers had evolved a complex relationship with their environment. With the development of agriculture, people narrowed their food selections so drastically that now all over the world only 3 cultivated plants, viz wheat, rice, and maize make up two-thirds of the human diet. The same is true of animal protein products which are mainly pork, chicken and beef. It may be noted that it takes three to five times as many farm resources to produce a single calorie or a gram of protein of meat or dairy product, compared to cereal grains, legumes, or tuber crops. Global meat production has increased fivefold since 1950 and in 2004 estimated production was 258 million tons. This huge production is possible only through factory farming. In China alone, there are an estimated 14,000 confined feeding operations, and about 15 per cent of its pork and chicken production comes from factory farms. This production of meat does not come without environmental costs. The FAO has calculated that meat production accounts for nearly a fifth of global green houses gas emissions. Dr R.K. Pachouri thus before proceeding to the International Meat on Climatic Change has made a powerful point that to save the world from global warming, we have to develop the habit of eating less meat. His argument that by skipping meat once a week, the emissions can be brought down, needs credence. Obviously, eating meat does not cause emissions, but the problem lies in the production processes, huge land clearances required for ranching animals, the mounds of farm waste produced and the way feed is grown for animals. Meat production also comes at the cost of oil as each stage of production, from growing feed to transporting and processing animals, is highly energy consumptive. Producing one calorie of beef takes 33 per cent more fossil fuel energy than producing a calorie of potatoes. Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) are operations that crowd hundreds of animals, cows, pigs or chickens, or turkeys together, with little or no access to light and fresh air and little opportunity to act naturally. This artificial environment creation themselves require large amount of energy for heating, cooking and lighting. The CAFO waste high in nitrogen, comes largely from animal feed, or from the fertiliser used to grow it. Factory farm depends on chemical fertilisers to grow food rather the manure waste, as it can be readily shipped to corn growers and feed corn to factory farms. In each case, the basic input is no longer produced by the landscape in which it is used for sustainable production. For example in the United States, of the total annual production of 600 million tons of waste annually, only half of it gets effectively used into the crop cycle, the remainder ends up polluting air, water and the soil itself. This raw waste, exposed to air, produces large amounts of gaseous ammonia, not only a source of immediate public health problems but also contributing to global warming. Next is methane produced during the process. Methane is sixty times more potent at capturing heat energy than carbon dioxide.
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THIS UNIVERSE Is our ‘universe’ flat or spherical in shape? 2. how can energy convert into mass as vice versa is possible, according to Einstein? 3. What will happen if we move with speed of light? Will time stop for us? What will happen to our mass? I am impressed by your curiosity. But I feel that any answer I give would become a divine idea. That would be bad. You must be patient and learn several things. Learn and understand. Then the answers that come to you would not be revelations. They would give you delight and satisfaction. This might take time, but that would be time well spent. Energy changes from one form to the other. When we speak in space, to which energy does sound energy change? Where does it go? Sound is a mechanical wave. It cannot travel into empty space because there is no material to vibrate. In the atmosphere, it weakens as it spreads out. If it hits a denser medium that is also porous, it can suffer multiple reflections, in the process transferring its energy to that material. So your spoken energy would become weak while spreading and some would be converted into heat while vibrating the materials it encounters. You perhaps know that the walls of a recording studio are covered with soft absorbing material. The material is absorbing because it has tiny holes that allow multiple reflections and, consequent efficient conversion into sub-sonic range and into heat. When anything is brought closer to our eyes it seems to be black in colour, whatsoever its colour is. Why is it so? Why do we see only black colour and not the original one? Similarly, when we close our eyes, we see only black image and not any colour. Why so? What is the relation of colour with nearness to our eyes? You see things because light falling on them is transformed. This happens because that thing absorbs some colours and not others. When you bring it very close to the eye you shut off the light falling on it. When no light falls, no light is scattered. When no light comes from somewhere we call it dark. That is the explanation for your observation.
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