The worst disaster of India's space programme occurred on 23rd February 2004, when an explosion ripped through the Solid Propellant Rocket Booster Plant in Satish Dhawan Space Center in Sriharikota, burning six workers to death and seriously injuring several more.
The Indian space programme was 'born' in November 1963, when an unmanned Apache Nike rocket (bought from the USA) was successfully launched from a launch pad amongst the coconut groves of Thumba, on the outskirts of Trivandrum, Kerala state's capital. The new "space centre" was hardly Cape Canaveral - the scientists had their offices in a disused church, the main workshop was the former bishops' house and the laboratory was an old cattle shed.
Indian Space Programme: 21st November 1963; Thumpa, Kerala (8°29N 76°55E) (various sources; time not known)
Accident: 23rd February 2004; Sriharikota (13°37N 80°18E); 3.50pm IST (10.20 am GMT) Source: The Hindu, February 24th 2004. If 2003 was the year of Mars, then 2004 looks like being the year of Saturn. The Cassini Saturn probe was launched over six years ago, on October 15th 1997. It caused controversy at the time because its generator is powered by 72 pounds of radioactive plutonium dioxide - protesters argued that a Chernobyl-style disaster could take place if anything went wrong with the launch. However, all went well and on the 1st of July Cassini will be making its long-awaited rendezvous with Saturn. It will settle into a four-year orbital flyby that will take it through the rings and close to most of the 18 moons of the Lord of the Rings. Additionally, on Christmas Day 2004, Cassini will drop off a probe that will explore the largest moon, Titan. Titan, just under half the size of Earth and only a little smaller than Mars, has a relatively dense atmosphere (mainly methane and nitrogen), so scientists are hopeful that it could support some sort of life, despite a surface temperature so cold that gas is liquefied. There could be at least one comet visible to the naked eye in the skies this Spring. Both Comet NEAT and Comet LINEAR (discovered by the Near Earth Asteroid Tracking program and the the Lincoln Laboratory Near Earth Asteroid Research respectively, hence the names) will become visible in Southern-hemisphere skies in March-April and will appear in the Northern hemisphere in early may. Comet NEAT is predicted to become a 1-magnitude object, meaning that it will be as bright as the brightest star; Comet LINEAR, however, will almost certainly be too close to the sun and too low on the horizon to be seen clearly. Talking of near-Earth objects, it has emerged that on January 14th this year only a lucky bit of weather in California deprived us of the spectacle of life imitating Hollywood art, in the shape of the American President on world-wide television announcing that the Earth could be hit by an asteroid within 24 hours. On January 13th, a previously unknown space object turned up in photographs taken by an asteroid-watching station in New Mexico and the astronomers there calculated that it was on a possible collision course with Earth. "A preliminary analysis of the discovery data for this object yielded a possible impact with the Earth in less than two days' time," said David Morrison, an asteroid and comet impact hazard expert at Nasa's Ames Research Centre. However, right then, there were only the grainy photos to go on; with heavy and persistent clouds covering the American continental Western coast it was impossible to refine the calculations with a visual check. The object was calculated to be around 30 metres wide - big enough to kill thousands if it hit a populated area.
As is the standard practice, the information on the find was immediately released to astronomy groups world-wide via the internet and astronomers everywhere were alerted to look for it. In the early hours of the 14th (US time) an amateur astronomer in California spotted a break in the clouds, pointed his telescope at the part of the sky where the object was supposed to be visible - and saw nothing that shouldn't have been there. The early calculations had been wrong, and the asteroid turned out to have missed Earth by some 12 million kilometres, about 32 times the distance between the Earth and the Moon. The astronomers breathed easy again, the President carried on sleeping and Bruce Willis put his shirt back on.
(Source: The Guardian, 26th February 2004
www.guardian.co.uk/life/news/story/0,12976,1156869,00.html)