Dhanush and Prithvi-II tested successfully

India’s Strategic Forces Command (SFC), which handles missiles with nuclear warheads, fired Dhanush and Prithvi-II missiles on March 11, 2011 and establishing the readiness of India’s nuclear deterrence systems. Both Dhanush and Prithvi-II are surface-to-surface missiles that can carry nuclear warheads. They are products of the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO). 

There are Army, Navy and Air Force versions of Prithvi, which is a single-stage missile that uses liquid propellants. Both Dhanush, the Naval version and Prithvi-II can carry nuclear warheads weighing 500 kg each. The stabilisation platforms of Dhanush-based ships enable its launching even during rough sea.

India's ballistic missile defence

Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) successfully tested a ballistic missile interception from its missile range on March 7^th 2011.

India's Ballistic Missile Defence (BMD) Interceptor missile was fired from Wheeler Island, which successfully intercepted an incoming hostile missile fired five minutes earlier. The 'hostile' missile was a specially modified Prithvi missile, fired from the Launch Complex III of the Integrated Test Range at Chandipur-on-sea in Balasore district, about 70km away from Wheeler Island across the sea.

The incoming ''enemy'' ballistic missile was intercepted at an altitude of 16 km and was destroyed through ''a direct kill”. The interceptor had a specially designed 'directional warhead'.

India's remote sensing satellites face threat from space debris created by China's anti-satellite test in 2007. India is strongly opposed to any attempt to place weapons in space or conducting any unconventional weapons tests in space as it would pose a perennial threat to all space systems regardless of their use for civilian or military purposes."

India's concerns regarding China are behind the revival of ballistic missile defence (BMD) discussions between India and the US. A possible acquisition of the Arrow from Israel or Patriot 3 from the US is also part of India's missile defence programme.

ISRO discovers cave in moon

ISRO scientists have discovered a giant underground cave on the moon, which could be used as a lunar base by astronauts for inter-planetary missions.

Scientists at the Space Applications Centre (SAC), using data gathered from Chandrayaan-I's Terrain Mapping Camera and Hyper Spectral Imager (HySI) payloads, found a 1.2 km long buried, uncollapsed and near horizontal lava tube.

The hollow cave situated just above the lunar equator on the nearside of moon, can accommodate a large number of astronauts and scientific instruments, and also protect them from hostile lunar environment.

"Such a lava tube could be a potential site for future human habitability on the Moon for future human missions and scientific explorations, providing a safe environment from hazardous radiations, micro-meteoritic impacts, extreme temperatures and dust storms," a team of scientists led by A.S. Arya of SAC, Ahmedabad.

ISRO Scientists said identifying sites for permanent base for human settlements on the moon is important for further investigation.

Cosmic census finds 50 billion planets in the Milky Way

Scientists finds the first cosmic census of planets in our galaxy and the numbers are astronomical at least 50 billion planets in the Milky Way. At least 500 million of those planets are in the not-too-hot, not-too-cold zone where life could exist. The numbers were extrapolated from the early results of NASA's planet-hunting Kepler telescope.

Kepler science chief William Borucki says scientists took the number of planets they found in the first year of searching a small part of the night sky and then made an estimate on how likely stars are to have planets. Kepler spots planets as they pass between Earth and the star it orbits.

So far Kepler has found 1,235 candidate planets, with 54 in the Goldilocks zone, where life could possibly exist. Kepler's main mission is not to examine individual worlds, but give astronomers a sense of how many planets, especially potentially habitable ones, there are likely to be in our galaxy. They would use the one-four-hundredth of the night sky that Kepler is looking at and extrapolate from there.

Borucki and colleagues figured one of two stars has planets and one of 200 stars has planets in the habitable zone, announcing these ratios Saturday at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual conference in Washington. And that's a minimum because these stars can have more than one planet and Kepler has yet to get a long enough glimpse to see planets that are further out from the star, like Earth, according to Borucki.

Charles Hayden Planetarium

 In the growing hush of full darkness, more than 9,000 stars appear, with so many gradations of intensity that binoculars can reveal more detail than the naked eye. That is the sensation offered by the newly renovated Charles Hayden Planetarium, which opened on 13 February 11 at the Museum of Science here, after a $9 million yearlong reconstruction, its new equipment, software and 57-foot dome promising to take the next generation to the stars.

                                      The dome of the Hayden Planetarium with a digital projection. 

It is easy to lose one’s balance in the vastness of space, and over the last 15 years as planetariums around the country have revamped their systems and shows to take advantage of the latest in digital technology and the most refined fiber-optic projectors from Zeiss (the same company that outfitted the first modern planetarium in Germany in 1923), many times the moorings have come loose. The domes have been used to stage fantastical free-for-all shows of cinematic effects, including dinosaurs, cartoonish tubes of warped space and sub-woofer grumblings.