Science This Week | India launches Aditya-L1 to study the sun, Pragyan rover safely parked and more Premium

Check out The Hindu’s science wrap featuring top 7 stories on new discoveries, findings, and studies in the scientific world from this week.

With the success of Chandrayaan-3 landing on the moon, ISRO has set its sights on the Sun. On September 2, it launched Aditya-L1 which is programmed to study the Sun. Read about this week’s latest studies and discoveries from the field of science here.

India’s first solar observatory mission — Aditya-L1 — was launched by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) on September 2. The Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV), in its 59th flight with the Aditya-L1 onboard, took off from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota at 11.50 a.m. About 63 minutes after take-off, the separation from the satellite took place with the PSLV launching the Aditya-L1 spacecraft in a highly eccentric orbit around the Earth at 12.53 p.m. This was among the longest flights of ISRO’s workhorse launch vehicle in recent times.

ISRO said on September 2 night that Chandrayaan-3’s rover Pragyan had completed its assignments and had been safely parked and set into sleep mode. The lander and the rover, with a mission life of one Lunar day (14 Earth days), have scientific payloads to carry out experiments on the lunar surface. Since its landing on the Moon on August 23, they have carried out many in-situ measurements and taken pictures. The battery is fully charged and the solar panel is oriented to receive the light at the next sunrise expected on September 22, it added.

Stargazers were in for a double treat this week: a rare blue supermoon with Saturn peeking from behind. On Wednesday night, a second full moon of the month rose which is dubbed a supermoon because it was closer to Earth than usual, appearing especially big and bright. This will be the closest full moon of the year, just 222,043 miles (357,344 kilometres) or so away. That’s more than 100 miles (160 kilometres) closer than the August 1 supermoon. As a bonus, Saturn was also visible as a bright point 5 degrees to the upper right of the moon at sunset in the east-southeastern sky, according to NASA. The ringed planet will appear to circle clockwise around the moon as the night wears on.

Previous research has shown that flies exhibit defensive responses that resemble fear-like emotional states. Now, a group of scientists in Japan built a virtual reality arena – a mini theatre for flies – fit with lights, cameras, screens, and a scary action scene to understand fear. Researchers found that the flies would turn away from the scary stimuli. Some flies froze or jumped, but most turned and ran away from the threat. The research also identified a cluster of 20-30 neurons in the visual regions of the fly’s brain is responsible for this behaviour.

In a paper published recently in Scientific Reports, scientists from IIT Roorkee have characterised dinosaur fossils from the Middle Jurassic period, found in the Thar desert near the Jaisalmer Basin by the Geological Survey of India. They discovered that they had uncovered remains of a sauropod dinosaur, which is the same clade as the long-necked herbivores in Jurassic Park – only these happened to be the oldest known fossils of this particular kind of sauropod.

Tropical cyclones that originate near the Equator, while being devastating, have been unusually subdued in recent decades. The last major cyclone of this kind in the Indian neighbourhood was the 2017 Cyclone Okchi which devastated Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka. However, a combination of global warming and a cyclical event called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) that repeats every 20-30 years, could make such cyclones more frequent in the coming years, a new study revealed.