Sunita Williams at IIT

The department of Aerospace Engineering of IIT Bombay had arranged a beautiful afternoon with a talk of United States Naval officer and a NASA Astronaut Sunita Williams. The department is celebrating its annual event “Zephyr” for the Golden Jubilee year of the institute. The lecture was open for all and was arranged in the convocation hall which has a capacity of 1700 people. Though having such a large capacity the hall became houseful in a while.

The Head of the Department formally introduced the speaker. He told that from the day of announcement of the lecture his inbox got crowded with emails. One kid emailed him that “Oh, she is with us for just 2 hours; it is just a 0.04% of the time she spent in the space!” The people especially the students all over Mumbai and outside rushed to IIT to see their IDOL. It was really astonishing moment for all present there.

Sunita Williams started her talk saying that everyone goes to freak out in summer. I went to space for my summer vacations. I stayed there for long time, I did some work but I really enjoyed the vacation. She showed a video presentation and explained how they feel in the gravityless world. Everyone in space station has their sleeping room where they sleep, clean the teeth, bath with wet towel, and everything that they do on Earth. There is no shower or a sink. They have to use the water carefully as it is limited. Water is recycled whenever possible and it is also used to create the oxygen. All the food is already packed for them. They do have to exercise for 2 hours daily to keep the bones and heart muscle least affected. To maintain the sensation of up and down the space station is designed in such a way that the lighting of the station is done in so called ceiling and the floor is also designed in such manner. Otherwise there is no up or down there.

Astronauts have to know each and every thing of the space station and they periodically check the systems. They do scientific experiments and check the results for zero gravity environment. They also experiment on themselves. These experiments are carried to know how things behave in such situations and what are the effects of long stay in such environment. These experiments will help to understand the requirements of the manned mission to mars. The spaceship with the today’s technology will take 8-9 months to reach the mars and the personnel will have to live there for at least one and half year before they start coming back.

After the speech people asked her lots of questions and she gave the fair answers without being tired. In the question answer session one small girl bravely asked her that “I want to congratulate you. Can I come on stage?” Sunita Williams for a while stunned due to the unexpected question but she allowed her and also came 2-3 steps ahead to meet her. This was a wonderful moment of the lecture and the cameras got flashed off continuously over the two.

Life in the Universe

Khagol Mandal is arranging free lecture series which is free to all and on last Wednesday Prof. M.N. Vahia came to deliver the third lecture in the series. Prof. Vahia is working in TIFR in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics. The lecture was on the topic “Life in the Universe”.

He started the lecture by saying the basic requirements to sustain the life formation. The basic molecule in any organism is DNA and RNA which store all the basic information about the organism and which is capable to replicate that is it has the capacity to produce the exact copy of itself. The DNA or RNA is the complicated molecule which is formed by the long chains of carbon atoms and other elements combined to them. Such long chins of atoms can be made by only tetravalent elements like carbon, silicon, germanium, etc. But in these all elements only carbon is the abundant element in the universe. So life forms must be carbon based. Hence we have to see the conditions where these molecules can sustain without braking and hence only certain small zone known as habitable zone around any star can give rise to the life formation.

After we fix our problem to a little zone around the star we will have to see other requirements like the gravity, temperature, water (this is the most necessary thing other than carbon), oxygen, ozone (UV rays can break the long carbon chain), etc. This is formulated by Drake and he gave the famous ‘Drakes Equation’ which gives the probability of occurrence of the life form in the universe. But unfortunately we cannot solve the equation as some values are unknown till date. But it seems from the equation that it is easy to prove that we (i.e. life) do not exist in the universe than to prove the existence of life outside Earth.

Prof. Vahia gave very useful and simple examples like spilling of milk, etc to explain the complicated things. The lecture was very exiting and everyone enjoyed the lecture and some of the comic sentences made by the Prof. to keep the lecture interesting throughout. Around 45-50 people attended the lecture. The next lecture in the series is on 17 Oct and is on the topic “Astronomy for Beginners”. It will be delivered by Pradeep Nayak, Director, Khagol Academy. For more details visit www.khagolmandal.com