This summer, the United Arab Emirates aims to join the ranks of just a handful of elite space-faring countries around the world by launching its first interplanetary mission to Mars. For the last six years, the small Middle Eastern country has worked tirelessly to build a spacecraft that can orbit the Red Planet to study its atmosphere and weather. Now, the mission is set to launch on top of a Japanese rocket.

Know as the Emirates Mars Mission, the project will kickstart a busy summer of missions to Mars. Following this launch, China also plans to launch an orbiter, rover, and lander to the Red Planet on July 23rd. Shortly after that, on July 30th, NASA is set to launch its next rover to Mars, called Perseverance. All of these missions are trying to get off the ground during a very small window this summer when Earth and Mars come closest to one another on their orbits around the Sun. This planetary alignment only happens once every two years, so if any of these missions cant launch this summer, theyll have to wait until 2022 to try again.

For the UAE, launching during this window is extra important, as the country is laser-focused on getting to Mars by next year. The 50th anniversary of the founding of the UAE is coming up in December 2021, and the UAE wants to celebrate with something big. Back in late 2013, UAE Prime Minister Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum asked the nations top space engineers to pull off the ambitious space mission by 2021 to commemorate the occasion. The timeframe that we had was very, very strict, Omran Sharaf, the project manager for the Emirates Mars Mission, tells The Verge.

Getting to this point has certainly not been easy. The UAEs space program has only been in operation for the last 14 years, and the programs main focus has been building and launching satellites to observe Earth. For this mission, UAEs space engineers had to design, for the first time, a spacecraft that could handle the harsh journey through interplanetary space. And that meant partnering with various academic institutions in the US to help get the job done. There was a lot to learn, Sharaf says. And the thing is... we didnt want to start from scratch; we had to learn from others.

Now, the UAEs spacecraft called Hope is complete and ready for takeoff. If all goes well with its launch, it will travel through space for the next seven months and reach Mars in February 2021. After it arrives, it will attempt to insert itself into orbit around Mars, something only a handful of spacecraft from four international space organizations have been able to achieve.

Before work could begin in earnest on the mission, the UAE had to decide what its spacecraft was going to do at Mars. When issuing the challenge, the UAE government specified that the scientific mission should be unique. One of the objectives that we had... was ensuring that the science of this mission was complementary to other missions, Sarah bint Yousif Al Amiri, minister of State for Advanced Sciences in the UAE, tells The Verge, adding that they wanted to gather data that could help answer scientific questions about Mars that have been left unanswered by previous missions.

Most of the spacecraft that have been sent to study Mars are tasked with analyzing the planets geology by taking high-resolution images of the Martian surface. Only a few Mars satellites are equipped with tools to study the planets atmosphere including NASAs MAVEN spacecraft and the European Space Agencys Trace Gas Orbiter but no mission has been able to get a global view of the Martian atmosphere closer to the surface.

The Hope spacecraft will give scientists a better understanding of whats happening in Mars lower atmosphere all over the planet and help people learn how the weather evolves throughout the year. The UAE is hailing Hope as Mars first weather satellite since it will monitor the weather throughout the day in as many locations as possible on Mars.

Such a tool could help planetary scientists learn more about the extreme events on Mars, such as the global dust storms that sometimes engulf the planet. In 2018, a massive storm took over much of Mars, cutting off communication permanently with NASAs Opportunity rover. Why does this planet have global dust storms? And why does it go on for such a long period of time? says Al Amiri. Thats among the other scientific questions that can be addressed now by this mission.

Hope is designed with three instruments to study the Martian atmosphere in detail: two will analyze the planet in infrared and ultraviolet light, while an imager will take visible color pictures of the planet.

Hope plans to take a highly elliptical path around the Red Planet. The orbit will bring the spacecraft in close to the surface ever 55 hours, allowing the vehicle to observe roughly the same parts of the planet at different times of the Martian day. Youre able to cover all local times, all areas of Mars, and that gives us the consistency that we require to be able to come and say that we do cover the day-to-night cycle for Mars, Al Amiri says.

Not only did the UAE team face a hard deadline, but they also had to adhere to other tough restrictions in order to build Hope. The UAE government gave them a set budget for the project of just $200 million, and the prime minister wanted the engineers to build the spacecraft themselves not buy it from someone else. Given all of these stipulations, the UAE team knew they couldnt do it all on their own.

The Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre, which built the Hope spacecraft, teamed up with the University of Colorado at Boulder a college thats been designing Martian instruments since the 1960s. Engineers in the UAE worked closely with researchers at UC Boulder every day as if they were all on the same team to design and test the Hope spacecraft. Thats whats unique about this project, Sharaf says. At the end of the day, you had US team members reporting to Emirati and you had Emirati reporting to US team members.

The Emiratis also received guidance from researchers at Arizona State University and the University of California, Berkeley throughout the course of the spacecrafts development. Thanks to these more experienced partnerships, the UAE team was able to build a unique and robust spacecraft without building brand-new infrastructure. To communicate with Hope, the Emiratis will also rely on NASAs Deep Space Network, an existing array of antennas throughout the world designed to connect with interplanetary spacecraft.

Since Hope is headed so far away, it has to be much more reliable and autonomous than any spacecraft the country has built before. A one-way radio signal can take up to 15 or 20 minutes to reach Mars, depending on where the planet is on its orbit. That means Hope must perform most of its functions on its own, including inserting itself into Mars orbit. When the vehicle reaches Mars, it will have to fire its onboard engines for 30 minutes, slowing itself down from 121,000 kilometers and hour to about 18,000 miles an hour. You go too fast, you crash on Mars, Sharaf says. You go too slow, it skips [on the atmosphere]; its a critical phase in the mission.

And if the technical challenges werent hard enough, the UAE team had to deal with a pandemic during the final stretch to launch. The engineers had to get the spacecraft to Japan three weeks earlier than planned to adhere to Japans quarantine rules. Engineering crews arrived early to go through two-week quarantines before they could receive the spacecraft and eventually help mount the spacecraft to the rocket. There was a real risk that, after six years of work, we could end up missing our launch window, Sharaf says. It was the last thing we had expected to encounter. The transfer was supposed to be routine and now it was mission critical.

The UAE team is optimistic that the Hope spacecraft will be able to make some significant new discoveries while at Mars. They hope theyll be able to announce scientific results in time for the countrys 50th anniversary in December.

But even before that happens, the Emirates Mars Mission has already had a significant impact on students in the UAE. One of the biggest motivations for the Hope mission was to inspire Emirati teens to go into STEM fields and to make UAE space scientists role models for children. So far, that mission has been a success, and Sharaf says that more students have been going into STEM fields than ever before. We saw students switching from international relations and finance, going into sciences; we saw universities that didnt have any science programs, starting science programs, because of the mission, Sharaf says. So that ripple effect of the mission and the impact of the mission actually was quite something that we can see and its tangible.

The UAE team hopes to keep that momentum going but first, Hope has to launch successfully. The spacecraft is slated to take off in the early morning hours on top of a Japanese H-IIA rocket out of the Tanegashima Space Center in southern Japan on Wednesday, July 15th, in the country. On the East Coast of the United States, liftoff is scheduled for 4:51PM ET on July 14th.

With the launch so close, the team is feeling a mixture of emotions after working so hard on this project after the last six years. I personally cant describe them at the moment, Al Amiri says. Perhaps ask us after we launch.

Excerpt from:

The UAEs first interplanetary mission to Mars set for launch - The Verge

1. Countdown to Mars: three daring missions take aim at the red planet  Nature.com
2. Join NASA for the Launch of the Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover  NASA Mars Exploration
3. Will We Recognize Life on Mars When We See It?  WIRED
4. It's the month of Mars! 3 Red Planet missions set to launch in July  Space.com
5. Summer on Mars: NASA's Perseverance Rover Is One of Three Missions Ready to Launch  Scientific American
6. View Full Coverage on Google News

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Countdown to Mars: three daring missions take aim at the red planet - Nature.com

(CNN) A mission 10 years in the making, NASA is one month out from launching the Perseverance rover to Mars. This rover, launching during a pandemic, will carry a tribute to health care workers around the world.

The 3-by-5-inch aluminum plate, installed on the left side of the rover chassis, shows Earth supported by the ancient symbol of the serpent entwined around a rod to represent the global medical community. A line represents the rovers trajectory from Central Florida to Mars, according to NASA.

We wanted to demonstrate our appreciation for those who have put their personal well-being on the line for the good of others, said Matt Wallace, Perseverance deputy project manager at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, in a statement.

It is our hope that when future generations travel to Mars and happen upon our rover, they will be reminded that back on Earth in the year 2020 there were such people.

WhenAlexander Mather, a seventh grade student in Virginia, entered his submission in a nationwide contest last yearto name the rover, a pandemic wasnt on the horizon. But his winning entry for Perseverance has proven to be the perfect name for a rover launching during unprecedented times.

These last few months of preparing the rover for launch have happened during the constraints of safe operation during a pandemic. But the teams rose to the challenge, and the launch remains on schedule.

The team never wavered in its pursuit of the launch pad, said Michael Watkins, director of NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in a statement. It was through their dedication and the help of other NASA facilities that we have made it this far.

The launch window opens on July 20 and extends until August 11, in case bad weather or other issues prevent the 9:15 a.m. ET launch on July 20. That date has been projected since the rover was announced in December 2012.

But launching during this window is critical during a time when Mars and Earth are on the same side of the sun, otherwise the spacecraft could be delayed from launching for two years until September 22.

The delay would cost the agency $500 million and impact the long-term goals of NASAs Mars Exploration Program, according to NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine.

I hope people watch this mission and that theyre inspired that we can strive and achieve even in the midst of challenging times, he said during a NASA press conference on Wednesday.

The July 20 date has other significance; its when NASA astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to walk on the moon.

Fifty-one years ago today, NASA was deep into final preparations for the first Moon landing, Bridenstine said. Today we stand at the threshold of another monumental moment in exploration: sample collection at Mars.

As we celebrate the heroes of Apollo 11 today, future generations may well recognize the women and men of Perseverance not only for what they will achieve 100 million miles from home, but for what they were able to accomplish on this world on the road to launch.

Perseverance is targeted to land in Mars Jezero Crater on February 18, 2021. The crater is 28 miles wide and the site of a lake that existed 3.5 billion years ago. Traces of a river delta can be seen in images captured by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. And the rover may be able to find signs of ancient life in this intriguing location on Mars.

The mission has one launch, 314 million miles of interplanetary space and seven minutes of terror to get safely onto the surface of Mars, said Lori Glaze, director of NASAs planetary science division, in a statement. When we see the landscape at Jezero Crater for the first time and we truly begin to realize the scientific bounty before us, the fun really begins.

Perseverance is the heaviest payload NASA will have ever landed on Mars, if all goes as planned, and its parachute system has gone through rigorous testing to ensure it can land the rover, which weighs 1 metric ton.

This will be NASAs ninth spacecraft to visit the Martian surface, but its the first that will collect samples to be returned to Earth by future missions.

Perseverance will take core samples of rock and regolith, or broken rocks and dust, using its Sample Caching System, the most complex and cleanest mechanism ever sent into space, according to NASA. It was imperative that the system be clean so theres no confusion over any potential biosignatures Perseverance may find and collect.

The system will stow samples in metal tubes dropped at collection sites across the crater. Later missions will retrieve these and return them to Earth in about 10 years from now, a complex endeavor that will be the result of NASA partnering with the European Space Agency.

Using its suite of scientific instruments, Perseverance will also study and characterize Mars climate and geology. Experiments on the rover will also help with preparation to eventually land humans on Mars.

Perseverance is also armed with 23 cameras, most of which will be able to capture color images and even high-definition video. The cameras will be active during the rovers entry, descent and landing.

Well be able to watch that big parachute inflate and watch the rover deploy and touch down, Wallace said. Its the first time we have ever been able to see a spacecraft land on another planet.

The video wont be available in real time for people tuning in as NASA monitors the rovers data during entry, descent and landing. But it will be shared in the weeks after landing.

The first priority will be data on how the rover is doing after landing, but we hope to have video back in the weeks after touchdown, said Andrew Good, JPL media relations specialist. Data will be coming back in pieces from multiple orbiters, which of course are shared by our other missions on the ground, Curiosity and InSight.

The rover is also carrying a couple of microphones, which will also be active during entry, descent and landing. The rover teams look forward to hearing the sounds of the rovers wheels on the Martian surface and the sound of wind on Mars.

Im excited to hear the sounds of Mars and the sounds of the rover interact with its environment, said Katie Stack Morgan, Perseverance deputy project scientist at JPL. She also suggested that interesting science could stem from the sounds theyll be able to hear as the rovers laser is aimed at rocks.

And stowed beneath the rover during its journey to Mars isIngenuity,which will be thefirst helicopterto fly on Mars or any planet in our solar system outside of Earth. The helicopter is scheduled to have three test flights during its time on Mars.

Its considered a demonstration payload, meaning that NASA can learn a lot from this experience and apply that to future missions. And Perseverance will be able to image Ingenuity as it flies over Mars, capturing the historic flight on another planet.

NASA said, We have already surmounted many obstacles on our way to the Red Planet, but as humans, we will not give up. We will always persevere.

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NASAs Perseverance rover will launch to Mars next month with a global tribute to health care workers - WHNT News 19

Studying Mars has been by turns tantalizing and heart-breaking, a constant dance as improving technology builds or dims hopes of finding life on our red neighbor.

Sarah Stewart Johnson, a planetary scientist at Georgetown University, shares the story of that quest and how the science of searching for life on Mars has progressed in her lyrical new book, "The Sirens of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World" (Crown, 2020). (Read an excerpt from "The Sirens of Mars.")

Johnson tells of how Mars turned from a red speck in Galileo's first observations to the harsh but vivid, recently static but geologically dynamic world that we know it as today, after decades of work by orbiters, landers and rovers. She also charts the tides of optimism and emptiness as humans have looked for life on our neighboring world.

Space.com talked with Johnson about the search for life on Mars in the past, present and future. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Related: Best space and sci-fi books for 2020

Space.com: How did this book come about, and why did you want to write this particular book?

Sarah Stewart Johnson: The book is about the search for life on Mars, but it's not just the science of it; it's about our human relationship to the planet as well. There were just so many things that were poignant and beautiful and compelling about the endeavor that will never really find expression in the pages of scientific journals. That's a large part of why I decided to write the book: this idea that Mars deserved a different type of treatment, something that kind of captured the mystery and the wonder, and just of the entire quest.

I would go to lectures and seminars and those types of things and I'd have my notebook and in the back, I would scribble down these things that I just thought were so interesting and compelling. And slowly those kind of came together and they became passages, and those passages became chapters, and then suddenly there was a book

Space.com: Can you talk about the decision to make it so personal?

Johnson: When I originally conceived of it, I was going to write a personal prologue. But as the narrative sort of moved along, I found that there were places where it felt like things resonated with me at this really personal level as well.

I open it with a scene of my dad when he was 18 years old [in 1965 when the first successful Mars mission, Mariner 4, flew by the Red Planet]. It just felt like, here he was, sort of every man, every human, watching this incredible thing unfold up in the sky. And it seemed like a nice way to open the book. Then there was another scene a few chapters later when I was 18 and we were actually returning to Mars for the first time in 20 years, and that seemed like a nice thing to add in.

Slowly, it just ended up being different things interwoven together, from my personal story and why I found Mars so endlessly fascinating, to the scientists that came before me and all of my predecessors and the lengths that they were willing to go to, to try to figure out if we're alone in the universe. And then there's also the science of it: how we get out of the darkness to a truer understanding of what this world really is. And so it all sort of blends together.

Space.com: What was the process of researching the book and choosing what to include like?

Johnson: I think something that really struck me was how so many Mars scientists have come from completely different walks of life Folks came at this from all different backgrounds with all different initial thoughts people that were really interested in wilderness or people that were really interested in benevolent civilizations. You sort of see this reflection in some ways of what they most longed for in their theories about Mars, and I just found that very poignant It was a paring down; there are lots of people and lots of passages that ended up in the graveyard of text that didn't quite make it into the book

I had this box filled with things that I would find when I was, in my spare time, thinking about the book things like old letters or photographs, or scientific articles where you could really see scientists struggling with trying to understand something that is very evident today but wasn't in their historical period.

I still feel really moved when I look back through that box. It just seems like this collection of all of these individuals, and they brought all of their humanity to the project, and they were just all in in this way that was really, really amazing.

Space.com: Could you talk about one object in that box that particularly speaks to you?

Johnson: I think there's one that I've been thinking about more lately, perhaps because of this moment with everything going on in the world. There was one scientist named William Pickering, and on the eve of World War I, he began writing these weather reports from Mars from this high plateau in Jamaica.

You've got menace gathering across Europe and he is describing these ideas, that what he saw were belts of clouds that were sweeping the sky or the greening of the southern maria [basins]. He has these incredible descriptions in these weather reports of what he imagined was taking place on the planet, and he depicted it as this just complete wilderness.

It was following on the heels of [Percival] Lowell and all these people that had believed that there were canals on the surface of Mars, and he depicts it as this place that's free of suffering and of injustice and of difficulty. It's just a refuge almost; it's just weather and it's just vegetation I think it was something that he most longed for this world that was free from all of the horrible things that were happening in his world, on his planet.

Space.com: Is this a tricky book to be publishing right before the launch of NASAs Mars 2020 mission?

Johnson: This project has really been percolating for a while The book, in many ways, just filled pockets of spare time here and there It seemed like a point where even though we didn't have the data [that the Perseverance rover will gather], that this would be a time where people might be curious about Mars. It's only every 26 months that the planets swing together on the same side of the sun, and it's a really exciting time for the Mars community with these three missions launching in the next couple of weeks.

Related: The search for life on Mars (a photo timeline)

Space.com: Why is looking for life on Mars a valuable endeavor regardless of the result?

Johnson: Even the discovery of simple life beyond Earth, I think, really stands to make a tremendous impact. We've had these massive advances over the last decades, but biology is still this rather descriptive science. It's because we have this one data point: We've got life on Earth and we don't have a second data point.

Especially if we found evidence of a second genesis [a case where life arose independently of life found on Earth, rather than migrating between the two worlds], I just think it'd be as revolutionary as any breakthrough that's been made in terms of thinking about ourselves and our existence.

But I think that we do it for reasons that are beyond just the science. It's one of the things I tried to capture in the pages of the book, that there are these really deep questions associated with the search. It touches on, 'Why are we here?' and, 'Why is there something and not nothing?' and 'Did that something from nothing happen once, or did it happen time and again?' 'Are we alone in the universe?'

I think those are the kinds of questions that we're hardwired to ask as a curious species, as human beings.

Space.com: What do you hope readers take away from the book?

Johnson: I guess one of the things for me is that when you think about your life on a planetary timescale and in the context of this enormous universe that we're part of, I think it really makes clear just how short our time here is and how important it is to make the very most of it. I hope that readers can take away a new perspective on our place in the universe

I'm hoping that the book is able to connect with folks from all different walks of lives to see this common entity in a new way.

Space.com: Do you think it's possible we'll hit the point at which scientists can confidently say there is no life on Mars, and if so what happens next?

Johnson: It's certainly possible there is no life on Mars, that we'll search and search and, like the moon, we can conclude pretty conclusively that that's it. But fortunately, there are lots of other targets, even in our own solar system, that are really exciting to think about

All these other astrobiological destinations Enceladus and Europa, and Titan's a place that we're really excited about in my laboratory. A lot of our work is trying to imagine life as we don't know it and how we might detect lifeforms that are almost inconceivable within the confines to their current thinking

One of the things that I tried to write about too in the book is just this idea that Mars is our near neighbor. It's this harsh place, but it's right there. And even if we were able to find life, just right next door, right there, like it would immediately suggest that the universe is just teeming with different types of biology. And that biology, especially if it's a separate genesis, is just a consequence of energetic systems. And if it's happened again right here, then surely it's happened everywhere

But I guess your main drive of the question was about, would it be sort of a disappointment? Or how would it fundamentally change the way we interact with Mars? What I've tried to do with the book is write a bit of a natural history of Mars, and I do think that the big question is there life there, is there not will have a big impact on how we think of the planet, and also how we move through the coming decades in terms of exploration

Who knows what we will find, but that's the one of the great things about Mars. It's accessible, and we have developed so many tools and techniques where we can really do such good science on the planet, we can get there quickly and we can deploy really capable robots to do really capable, scientific, tremendously sophisticated science on the surface

At some point, I think that we would be able to say we've looked at every nook and cranny and we can move on to another destination. We can continue this search deeper into our own solar system or to one of the tremendous gazillions of other planetary bodies that we've detected in the universe.

We can't be done.

You can buy "The Sirens of Mars" on Amazon or Bookshop.org.

Email Meghan Bartels at mbartels@space.com or follow her on Twitter @meghanbartels. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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'The Sirens of Mars' tells of the search for life on Mars - Space.com

Author Minnie Vaid with Women and Child Development Minister Maneka Gandhi at the launch of the former's book - 'Those Magnificent Women and their Flying Machines: ISROS Mission to Mars' in Delhi in March 2019.

Remember the picture of a bunch of Kancheepuram saree-clad women hugging each other and celebrating the success of Indias Mars Orbiter Mission in 2014? The exuberant women in the photo were among those who led the Mars mission also known as Mangalyaan one of the most ambitious projects of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).

The names of the women who were among the top leadership for the mission Ritu Karidhal, Nandini Harinath, Moumita Dutta, and Minal Sampat among them - were made familiar to the common man through news reports; but little more was known about their journeys. After all, the gender barriers in a male-dominated field are certain to have made their lives hard; add to it, all of these women have familial obligations that often restrict women from climbing up the career ladder.

Yet, when author Minnie Vaid approached Ritu, Moumita and Minal for writing a book on them, they were surprised Why us? What did we do? was their question. Minnie, who has been a journalist, documentary film-maker, and a published author, had to convince them about the respect they command, and how their stories can inspire generations of women to pursue Science and assume leadership roles.

After months of following up with the ISRO, Minnie was finally able to interview not just the leaders of the Mangalyaan but altogether 21 women at ISRO including the four women mentioned above, as well as N. Valarmathi and T.K. Anuradha, along with Rashmi Sharma, Shilpi Soni, and Harshita Tolani among others.

The book, titled Those Magnificent Women and their Flying Machines: ISRO'S Mission to Mars, was published by Speaking Tiger publishing house in 2019. It was launched in Delhi and Mumbai in March 2019 by Women and Child Development Minister Maneka Gandhi and actress Vidya Balan respectively. Its second edition has been published in January 2020.

Talking to MAKERS India on a Zoom call recently, Minnie Vaid recollected how the women of ISRO shattered the stereotypes of scientists she had had. They had very enriching lives, and yet they had great modesty. When I struggled with understanding the scientific terms (as part of the research for the book), the women I interviewed patiently explained those to me. Their only request was to call them scientists, and not women scientists, Minnie says.

Interestingly, Minnies previous book was also about women who were previously unheard of yet made a mark with their determination and resilience. In The Ant in the Ear of the Elephant: The Story of the People's Struggle Against the Koodankulam Nuclear Plant, published in 2016, Minnie had covered women at another end of the spectrum poor, unlettered women who conducted non-violent protests against the Koodankulam Nuclear Power Plant (KKNPP) for around four years since 2011 in the coastal village of Idinthakarai, in the southern state of Tamil Nadu.

It was the proverbial fight between David and Goliath, according to Minnie, with the villagers living in the vicinity of the KKNPP (and hence most affected by it), pitted against the Central government. National media had not even covered the issue when I went to Idinthakarai in 2013 to interview the women who had been protesting for about three years by then. Thankfully, my publisher (Rajpal Publishing) was very supportive, she tells MAKERS India.

ALSO READ: Made in India: The Story Behind How a Wellness Brand Was Born in a Garden-Lab in Mohali

The launch of The Ant in the Ear of the Elephant in 2016 was attended by actor-filmmaker Nandita Das and veteran journalist Kalpana Sharma in Mumbai. For the launch, Minnie had invited two of those women who led the protests. She recollects, how the audience was enthralled by their stories (despite having to be translated from Tamil by an interpreter), and gave a standing ovation.

Mumbai-based Minnie, who has been a journalist and documentary film maker for about 30 years, says that justice is the underlying theme in her work. May be thats why the books she has written before The Ant in the Ear of the Elephant were also about individuals fighting for justice and giving hope to marginalised communities.

Minnies book Iron Irom: Two Journeys -published by Rajpal publishing house and launched by actor Abhay Deol in Mumbai and Sharmila Tagore in Delhi in 2012- was about Irom Sharmila, the Iron Lady of Manipur. Minnie recollected interviewing the renowned activist, and also how her previous stint at a journalist in the North East was instrumental in the writing of this book.

Notably, Minnies first ever book A Doctor to Defend: the Binayak Sen Story (translated in four regional languages) was on a controversial hero Dr.Binayak Sen, the Chattisgarh-based doctor and public health specialist who was imprisoned for supporting the Naxalite movement.

Minnie, who has produced, directed, and scripted over 30 films and television programs, some of which have won national and international awards, also produced a documentary on him under the same title. The book was launched in Delhi by Nobel Laureate Prof. Amartya Sen in January 2011.

Asked about her inspiration to base her first-ever book on Dr.Sen, Minnie says, It was very much in line with the kind of work I'd been doing in the past (stories) of a small person fighting against the might of the state. These kind of stories anyway have huge attraction to me. Justice is the underlying thread through and through.

ALSO READ: How This Chef-Turned-Techie From Uttarakhand Built a Startup in AI

However, Minnies latest work - the awesomely titled (and written) ISRO's Magnificent Women and Their Flying Machines - is about celebrating the spirit of women who overcame centuries of gender inequality and injustice to make history. Her dream is to see a woman chairperson at ISRO one day.

At ISRO, you get the work that you merit and deserve; your promotions are according to your work, not your gender. It is hierarchical, so you can't just skip over a person and jump ahead, she says, adding that there are less number of women in the senior roles at ISRO today because 30 years ago, very few women joined it. But more women have joined in the last 10 years; so we may see a woman chairing ISRO soon, Minnie hopes.

After all, every womans success story is an inspiration for a generation of women to come forward, and thats why telling womens stories are all the more important. It's impossible not to be favorably biased towards telling women stories because other people don't tell them. There are very few people telling women stories consciously, Minnie signs off.

ALSO READ: World Population Day is a Womens Rights Issue

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From The Women Who Led India's Mars Mission to The Women Protesters at a Nuclear Power Plant: Minnie Vaid's Pen Covers Them All - Yahoo India News

A scramjetwhich features an engine that uses an engines forward motion to compress incoming air, which flows at supersonic speeds. PHOTO/NASA, Tony Landis.

Ivan Bermejo-Moreno likes his coffee with a touch of turbulence. But instead of mixingcoffee and cream with a spoon, when it comes to hypersonic jet planes planes that can flyfive times faster than sound he likes to mix oxygen from the air and jet fuel using something a bit stronger: shock waves.

Similar principles govern fluid mixing in aircraft engines, where oxygen from the air has tomix with fuel to help propel it at a certain speed. USC researchers in the USC Viterbi Department of Aerospace andMechanical Engineering, including Xiangyu Gao, aUSC Viterbi Ph.D. student who recently defended his dissertation, and his doctoral advisor,Assistant Professor Ivan Bermejo-Moreno,are studying how to achieve efficient mixing at high speeds. Bettermixing allows supersonic combustion enginesin which airflow is greater than the speed ofsoundto remain shorter in length while enabling vehicles to move hypersonically. One approach to achieve thisis to use shock waves.

A shockwave is characterized by an abrupt change in pressure, temperature and density ofa medium and moves faster than the local speed of sound. Without applying a shock wave, mixing will occur, as in the example with coffee and cream, but it will take much longer,Bermejo-Moreno said. Shock waves amplify turbulencesimilar to a spoon in the coffeeexampleand the more turbulence you have,the more rapidly mixing can occur.

The researchers recently published a study in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, which sharesconditions in which such rapid mixingwhich supports faster, more efficient vehiclescan occur. Once a shock wavea sudden and strong disturbance in a mediumis produced, thespeed of the fluid passing through it will be drastically reduced, also allowing more time formixing. This puts the fuel and air in a better condition for combustion, and will increase the temperature, making it easier to auto-ignite, the researchers said.

In conditions where mixing can be handled efficiently enough to support hypersonic vehicles, there are numerous implications, including commercial applications for the exploration of space.

Said Bermejo-Moreno: Imagine instead of a rocket you have something lighter and smaller that could take us all the way to Mars. The combination of scramjets and rotating detonation engines, both based on shockwaves and turbulence, may one day do just that.

The research team also includes Johan Larsson, associate professor of mechanical engineeringat the University of Maryland. The researchers conducted this study performing massivelyparallel numerical simulations on the supercomputers at USCs High PerformanceComputing Center and at Argonne National Laboratory.

Fundamental Building Blocks of Flow

The study isolated the physics the researchers were interested in exploring by using afundamental geometric set upessentially a boxand removing variables related tosurface friction on the nature of fluid or air flow. In the study, the flow would come in fromone side of the box and encounter a shockwave created by carefully controlling thepressure inside of the box. Then it exits through the opposite side of the box, Bermejo-Moreno said.

In this way, we isolated the interaction between turbulent flows and shockwaves, Bermejo-Moreno said. While people have studied the pure interaction of turbulence and shockwaves in the past, the researchers said only a few studies have focused on mixing in this configuration. Shockwaves are generated by the large (supersonic) speed of the air as it encounters air inlets, Bermejo-Moreno said. Geometric deflections, like corners, are usually enough to produce shock waves.

The researchers studied a greater range of parameters than in prior studies, as well, including variations in incoming speeds of air flow. The researchers also looked at different levels of turbulence.

To visualize turbulence, consider a faucet, Bermejo-Moreno said. When the faucet is barely on, the flow is slow, transparent and smoothknown as laminar. But as you keep opening the faucet up, the velocity of the water increases. The water stream becomes blurry and no longer transparentits what you would call turbulent. The same thing happens in the air and in mixtures of air and fuel we discuss in hypersonic vehicles.

The researchers said that they are most interested in turbulent flows, because they are most representative of what is actually happening in reality. Just like when you add milk to your coffee and do not stir it up, without a shock wave, which increases turbulence, mixing will occur but it will take much longer. In the study, the researchers found that while some quantities related to mixing levels will saturate after a certain amplification of turbulence, others will keep increasing, suggesting mixing continues to improve as turbulence increases.

Next the researchers hope to look at additional geometries and see how these impact mixing. In the future, one of the elements we want to investigate is how different shapes of turbulent structuresknown as eddiesimpact mixing. For instance, how a tube-like structure might impact the transport and mixing of fuel and air differently than a sheet-like structure. If you know the type of turbulent structures that are dominant in mixing, then you might want to produce more of these structures, Bermejo-Moreno said.

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Shock Waves Might Offer the Jolt Needed to Reach Mars - USC Viterbi | School of Engineering - USC Viterbi School of Engineering

Provided by CNET The Hope probe (Al Amal) will circle Mars on a 55 day orbit, analyzing its atmosphere. MBRSC

The United Arab Emirates will head to Mars for the first time on Tuesday. From Tanegashima, a Japanese island in the north Pacific ocean, a Mitsubishi H-IIA booster will carry a car-sized probe known as "Al Amal," or "Hope," to space -- and onto the red planet.

The probe is expected toreach orbit around the red planet in early 2021. It's designed to give a full picture of the Martian atmosphere, offering a holistic view of how Mars' climate varies during the year.

Thelaunch from Tanegashima, Japan, opensTuesday, July 14, at 1:51 p.m. PT. It'lllaunch on a Mitsubishi H-IIA booster. The rocket isn't quite as famous as the likes ofSpaceX's Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy rockets, but it does have a great launch history, with over 40 successful launches under its belt, mostly of Japanese satellite systems.

TheMohammed bin Rashid Space Centre will carry a livestreamof the launch from Japan, which you canwatch via this link. Or, tune into the livestream below:

Hope is the first interplanetary mission led by an Arab, Muslim-majority country and, if successful, will add another nation to the list of Martian explorers.

"The intent was not to put a message or declaration to the world," Sarah Al Amiri, chair of the UAE Council of Scientists and deputy project manager for the Emirates Mars Mission,told CNET in March. "It was, for us, more of an internal reinforcement of what the UAE is about." The historic launch is set to be livestreamed across the globe.

The satellite will study the connections between Mars' lower and upper atmosphere and examine what causes the loss of hydrogen and oxygen into space. It'll collect data for two years after achieving its orbit around Mars in February 2021. There's an option to extend the mission to 2025.

Aboard Hope are three instruments which will enable the probe to study the Martian atmosphere more intensely. There's a high-resolution camera known as the Emirates eXploration Imager (EXI), a UV imager known as the Emirates Mars Ultraviolet Spectrometer (EMUS), and a scanning infrared imager dubbed the Emirates Mars InfraRed Spectrometer (EMIRS).

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Hope mission to Mars: How to watch historic launch to the red planet Tuesday - MSN Money

TOKYO - Final preparations for the launch from Japan of the United Arab Emirates first Mars mission were underway Monday, but there was a chance of a delay because of bad weather, a Japanese rocket provider said.

The liftoff of the UAEs Mars orbiter named Amal, or Hope, on a Japanese H-IIA rocket is scheduled for early Wednesday from the Tanegashima Space Center in southern Japan, in what would be the Arab worlds first interplanetary mission.

A final decision will be made Tuesday before the roll out of the rocket, said Keiji Suzuki, launch site director for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries.

A seasonal rain front was expected to cause intermittent lightning and rain over the next few days, he said.

But this thunder is not expected to be severe or lasting, and our assessment is that there will be a chance for a launch, Suzuki told an online briefing Monday from Tanegashima. We will make a careful decision based on data.

Heavy rain has continued for more than a week in large areas of Japan, triggering mudslides and floods and killing more than 70 people, most of them on the southern main island of Kyushu.

Hope is set to reach Mars in February 2021, the year the UAE celebrates 50 years since its formation. A successful Hope mission would be a major step for the oil-dependent economy seeking a future in space.

Hope carries three instruments to study the upper atmosphere and monitor climate change and is scheduled to circle the red planet for at least two years.

Emirates Mars Mission Project Director Omran Sharaf, who joined Mondays briefing from Dubai, said the mission is not just a repeat of what other countries have done. It will provide a complete view of the Martian atmosphere during different seasons for the first time, he said.

Two other Mars missions are planned in coming days by the U.S. and China. Japan has its own Martian moon mission planned in 2024.

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Follow Mari Yamaguchi on Twitter at https://www.twitter.com/mariyamaguchi

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Bad weather may delay 1st UAE Mars mission on Japan rocket - ThePeterboroughExaminer.com