After basking in the glory of a successful mission to moon, Indian space scientists are now planning to send a man to space in an Indian spacecraft.

The scientists expect to realise the dream by 2015.

The project will involve an expenditure of Rs 12,000 crore.

The proposal for the mission has been submitted to the government and the pre- project clearance has already been given.

"It will be a major turning point for Indian space scientists after the successful mission to moon," G. Madhavan Nair, chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), said at the 96th session of the Indian Science Congress.

Though sending a manned mission to moon is still quite far, the space scientists have started working on designs and logistics of a space capsule that will carry humans around the earth at a Low Earth Orbit (LEO) - an orbit which extends from the earth's surface up to an altitude of 2,000 km - and bring them back, Nair said. "We have postulated the idea." The capsule will have the capacity to carry three persons to the space and return to a pre- determined destination on earth. The mission duration will be up to seven days.

The designing of the spacecraft will involve many technologies.

It has to be equipped with radiation protection system and life- support system. It will also have a waste management system. ISRO has developed a conceptual design and has envisaged the technologies that need to be developed. It will take three to four years for the ideas to materialise.

Managing the crew's safety will be a crucial part of the mission.

If anything goes wrong, the capsule should be able to abort the mission and implement a crew escape system.

The mission will involve creating ground stations and launch facilities, besides crew training.

Nair said a preliminary review and assessment of India's first moon mission will be carried out at the end of this month.

India's mooncraft Chandrayaan has started mapping the lunar surface to see whether there are any minerals like helium or water on the moon.

The cameras on the Chandrayaan have caught over 35,000 images of the moon.

Nair said sending the mission to moon was not simple as the challenge was to escape earth's gravity and influence of the sun and the moon.

However, India's moon mission was more precise than those launched by other countries.

Thirty per cent US missions have crashlanded on the moon, he said.

Indian scientists also overcame challenges managing temperature on the moon, which is quite hot. In fact, subsystems had started failing due to the high temperature.

However, scientists could reorient the spacecraft. "All is now well," Nair said. The next mission to moon will involve sending a lander which will go around the moon and pick up samples.

From Mail Today

Results from a new study have claimed that thinking too much can lead to weight gain.

Tests by a research team led by Dr. Angelo Tremblay which measured the food intake of 14 students found that participants who went through a strenuous intellectual workout consumed more calories than when they rested.

According to Psychosomatic Medicine, students took in 203 more calories after reading through a text and 253 more calories after a computer test compared to eating during a rest period.

The study's author Jean-Philippe Chaput said: "These fluctuations may be caused by the stress of intellectual work, or also reflect a biological adaptation during glucose combustion."

He added: "Caloric overcompensation following intellectual work, combined with the fact we are less physically active when doing intellectual tasks, could contribute to the obesity epidemic currently observed in industrialised countries."

The study was carried out at Quebec's Universite Laval in Canada.

"The mapper spectrometer has beamed images of the Orientale Basin region of the moon, indicating abundance of iron-bearing minerals such as pyroxene. Using different wavelengths of light, the instrument has also revealed for the first time changes in rock and mineral composition," M3 principal investigator Carle Pieters said in a statement hosted on NASA Website.

Data from the 7-kg mapper provides space scientists first opportunity to examine lunar mineralogy at high spatial and spectral resolution.

The Orientale Basin is located on the moon's western limb. M3 captured the data last week when Chandrayaan was orbiting the moon at an altitude of 100 km.

"The imaging spectrometer provides us with compositional information across the moon that we have never had access to before. Our ability to identify and map the composition of the surface in geologic context provides a new level of detail needed to explore and understand the earth's nearest celestial neighbour," affirmed Pieters, who teaches at Brown University in Rhode Island.

The mapper was selected as a mission of opportunity through the NASA discovery programme. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory designed and built the instrument at Pasadena in California.

"M3 will also help in characterising and mapping lunar minerals for knowing the moon's early geological evolution. Its compositional maps will improve our understanding of the early evolution of a differentiated planetary body and provide a high-resolution assessment of lunar resources," Chandrayaan project director M. Annadurai averred.

M3 is one of the 10 instruments onboard the unmanned Chandrayaan, conducting experiments while the spacecraft orbits over the moon next two years.

Five instruments were indigenously built by the state-run Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), while the remaining six payloads are of foreign origin, including three from the European Space Agency, two from NASA and one from Bulgaria.

Chandrayaan was launched on October 22 onboard the 316-tonne polar satellite launch vehicle (PSLV-C11) from ISRO's Satish Dhawan Space Centre at Sriharikota spaceport, about 80 km north of Chennai.

After traversing 3,84,000 km through the deep space for 18 days, the spacecraft entered the lunar orbit on November 8 and its moon impact probe was lowered on the moon's surface on November 14.

These suggestions come even as the Government, the Reserve Bank of India and commercial banks of both public and private genres have come out with a serious of fiscal and monetary measures to boost the housing sector.

T. Chitty Babu, Secretary of the Tamil Nadu unit of CREDAI, said common laws across the country would make the system transparent and encourage regional players to go national. ``Uniform development charges, infrastructure and impact fee and rationalization of stamp duty will accelerate development,'' he added. This would go a long way to encourage people to invest in any part of the country.

In an interaction with this correspondent, Mr. Babu said ``the need of the hour is for the Government to introduce the concept of a single-window system on the lines created for the IT (information technology) sector so that the approvals for the projects can be obtained within a maximum time frame of a month as against the current scenario of a year. This could easily ensure a saving of at least Rs.300 per square feet,'' he pointed out.

"RPL commenced its crude processing (today). The secondary processing units are now under synchronization and commissioning," a company press statement said.

"The entire refinery complex is expected to attain full capacity shortly," it said but did not give a specific date.

The new unit has come up adjacent to Reliance's existing 660,000 bpd (33 million tons a year) mostly-for-exports refinery at Jamnagar.

"RPL refinery has been completed in 36 months from concept to commissioning, which is a new benchmark for building a grass-root refinery of this scale and complexity," the statement said.

Company's Chairman Mukesh Ambani said: "Commissioning this large and complex refinery in record time... yet again demonstrates the strength of our project management skills."

"We, at Reliance, continue to be committed to the long term potential of the refining sector. We will leverage our competitive advantages of scale, complexity and capability to process a wide range of crude oils and flexibility to produce high quality transportation fuels," he said.

RPL, in which the US energy major Chevron Corp hold five per cent stake, will produce petrol and diesel complaint to Euro-IV emission norms.