My thinking has always been that space is big, there’s room enough for everyone. So congrats to the Indians and the successful launch of their Chandrayaan-1 mission to the moon. Its not just bopping across the aether to the moon, but its taking along 12 separate scientific instruments (6 from foreign countries, including the US) in one neat 60 kg package.
As a side note, NASA hopes to use some of their findings when launching their Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter sometime next year. They hope to give the LRO some good spots to look at with its radar in order to scout out some possible landing sites.
Chandrayaan, as the news reports love to tell you, is Yiddish Sanskrit for "Moon Craft," which causes me to ask why the ancient Sanskritians Indians had a word for moon craft. (Hmmm…ancient Indian moon craft, someone tell Richard Hoagland!) It also brings to mind one of my favorite 20th century scientists, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar , whose last name, wikipedia tells us, is a commen Tamil name that, in Sanskrit, means "Holder of the Moon." NASA’s Chandra X-Ray observatory was named in his honor, although the word Chandra, of course, means "moon. "
Here’s a link to a transcript interview of Chandrasekhar by the American Institute of Physics. It has the curious warning:
This transcript may not be quoted, reproduced or redistributed in whole or in part by any means except with the written permission of the American Institute of Physics.
Reproduced and redistributed, I can get, but I can’t quote this? At the great risk of personal and professional ramifications, I simply must.
Weart:
I see. What sort of feeling did people have in your home towards science? Your grandfather had been a professor of mathematics.
Chandrasekhar:
Well, there was always an atmosphere of science. You know, my father’s brother is the famous Indian physicist (Chandrasekhara Vankat ) Raman, who got the Nobel Prize.
Weart:
Oh, I didn’t know that.
So there. Bite me, AIP . (Of course, I’ll immediately drop to my knees and beg for forgiveness at the first sign of a cease and desist order.)
Oh wait, that’s C.V. Raman he’s talking about, a Nobelist and discoverer of the processed noodle Raman scattering , which describes how the frequency of light can scatter once it bounces off another object, depending on that object’s composition (I think, I’m a little hazy on the topic). I’d imagine that would be handing for things like, I dunno, analyzing the minerals on the surface of, say, the moon.
Whoa.