Gliding back home

national Aeronautics and Space Administration (nasa) has come up with 'gliding lifeboats' that could return astronauts to earth if the international space station ever needs to be evacuated.

A better view

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), US, is planning to improve the EGRET (energetic gamma-ray experiment telescope) -the best high energy gamma-ray instrument installed in the Compton gamma-ray observatory satellite. Observations of gamma-rays in the cosmos provide us with important clues to young pulsars and gamma-ray bursts from different objects. The proposed in!!trument called GLAST (gammaray large area telescope) will be about 10-100 times better than EGRET in terms of its field of view, sensitivity and angular resolution. NASA hopes to launch it early next

Fielding robots

Bad news from above

the first comprehensive global analysis of National Aeronautics and Space Administration's ( nasa 's) 15-year satellite data reveals that increasing amounts of solar ultraviolet ( uv ) radiation have been hitting the earth's surface, with the thinning of the atmospheric ozone shield (see Down To Earth , Vol 5, No 7).

Rocked!

when Roberta Score, a former staffer of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (nasa), picked up a little rock one morning in Allan Hills, Antarctica, she knew she was holding something unique in her hands.

Battling blaze up there

More people, more heat

the first global analysis of satellite data by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration ( nasa ) has revealed an interesting finding. Collating 15 years of data, scientists have come to the conclusion that harmful radiation from the sun has been hitting major population centres across the world in increasing amounts.

Comfort above the clouds

if you thought that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration ( nasa ) only flew missions to esoteric destinations and designed spacecrafts to endorse the 'Star Wars' programme, there is some news for you.

Mission: Planet Earth

WITH the new millennium just round the bend, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has dedicated several missions for a planet it did not care for much before - Earth. Dubbed 'The Planet Earth Enterprise', the project seeks to implement NASA's space-age technology for life on earth. An advance, lightweight scientific instrument designed to produce visible and infrared images of the earth's land

Flying with a laptop

THANKS to Steve Casner, a research scientist at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) Ames research centre at Mountain View, California, us, aspiring pilots can now learn to fly advanced commercial aircrafts by using nothing more than a laptop computer. Casner's basic idea was to simulate the programme found in most of the advanced aircrafts' flight management softwares, which allows one to switch an