Chinese and Indian lunar landing sites .

The space where Yutu 2 landed on lunar surface ..

2019 can be described as the best year for India and China in space, more particularly, the moon. Chinese Chang'e 4 spacecraft landed on the South pole of Moon in the von Karman crater, in the Aitkin crater on the 3rd of January 2019.(not to forget the US and Japanese successes on Mars and Ryugu meteoroid respectively in 2019).

India launched the Chandrayaan 2 mission on the 22nd of July 2019 and the Vikram lander and Pragyaan rover will land on lunar surface near the lunar South pole, near the brink of the Aitkin crater, one of the largest on the lunar solar surface with a diameter of 2400 km on the 6th of September 2019.

Click here for a link on Yutu2 rover on lunar surface.

The Von Karman crater in the Aitkin
crater where Yutu 2 landed

Click here for a VOA report on Chandrayaan 2 launch ..

Both the Chinese and India
missions of 2019 are landing on the other side of moon which is never visible to us on earth.

The rover communicates with a lunar orbiter which is in contact with the earth station. Every lunar night lasting 14 earth days, the temp on lunar surface can go to -140 deg Celsius. 

The Chinese Chang'e rocket released the orbiter, Que Qiao satellite already orbiting the moon and the Yutu 2 rover landed in the 180 km diameter and 13 km deep Von Karman crater.

As has been indicated by ISRO, Indian Space Research Organisation, lander Vikram will land near the brink of the Aitkin crater.

This is how Yutu 2 is communicating with the
earth station

How can these landings of the Chinese and Indian missions on moon be helpful for humanity.

In six months, the 140 kg Chinese rover Yutu 2 has traveled just 160 m on the lunar surface. In two weeks as per indications the 27 kg Pragyaan would be traveling almost 150 to 200 metres on lunar surface, with a life to last just 14 days.

 The Indian rover would in turn be carrying out a series of experiments that will help it find the extent of water on lunar surface.

The Aitkin crater near the
lunar south pole

Will the landings and the subsequent discoveries of water, moisture etc. help the world to set up camps to stay there ?

If water is available and with the supply of oxygen which can be ensured either with experiments or can be taken from earth, can we we grow vegetables and fruits out there in space in large volumes and bring them to earth for human consumption ?

Yutu 2 on moon, Credits China Space Administration

China has a strategic intent in this lunar mission as moon is known to have vast reserves of Helium 3, most suitable for nuclear fusion energy generation. Yutu 2 is looking out for deposits of Helium 3 on lunar surface.

The strategic military intent of China on lunar surface is a cause of worry for US, Russia and India ..

Other side of moon, China Space

No earth expedition has been able to find what is underneath a planet like Mars or the moon surface, except the Hayabusa2 spacecraft of Japanese Space Agency JAXA, which has been able to shoot into the Ryugu asteroid 300 million kms away from earth on the 12th of June 2019 and collect samples of sub-surface materials on the asteroid.

We hope all the countries of the world who are exploring outer space in the solar system to be able to collect solid evidence that points fingers at the right time and mix of celestial events that led to the formation of our solar system.

George.. (Picture credits to Planetary News, spacenews.com and space.com)..

Huge IC engine car inventory and the future ..

Maruti, Tata, Honda, Mahindra shut down production – Cars worth Rs 35000 Crore; two wheelers valued at Rs 17000 Crore are lying unsold. Dealers are closing down business. About 300 dealerships around the country have shut down.

Click here for India Today August '19 link

Shocking !! Marketing is such a big sham .. How can this problem be solved ? Can the greatest Marketing experts from top corporations and top Indian Universities solve this ? Why is marketing departments in organisations such a big failure? No demand for cars ?? What are the solutions provided by the Marketing Professors of the world to solve this crisis ?

An unsold car grave, courtesy quora.com

Why has this happened to India ? Tata Motors has been showing dismal results mainly  because of its Jaguar sales dipping in the Chinese markets. With an INR 8,30,000 crore automobile industry in the country, almost Rs 50,0000 crores lying as unsold inventory is really bad news.

Let us try to analyse what are some of the important reasons for this sad plight of Indian automotive sector ?

1. Innovate to EVs .. With Tesla getting ready to enter the country by mid 2020, are we going to see a major EV revolution ?

2. Is it the immediate impact of Ola and Über ?

3. Are the people getting more aware of the harmful impacts and environmental damage of these IC engined non-renewable fuel guzzlers waiting for electric vehicles to storm the market ? 

4. Climate change regimes need cars to migrate to less polluting BIS VI norms from early next March and the inconsistency and confusion in the transition to stricter vehicle emission norms is creating greater confusion among the public.

Courtesy India Today

5. Is it an after effect of the senseless demonetization initiated by PM Modi in his earlier rule in the year 2016 ?

6. The high cost of fuel and the shabby car purchase loan schemes offered by financial companies also have a part to play here.

7. The low costs of second hand vehicles is also playing a great role in the unsold inventory of new vehicles

Is this pointing to India showing signs of rapid EV adoption ahead of the world? With EV technology outsourced by ISRO to many of the automobile companies, the talk and discussions among all automobile companies is on how profitable and enjoyable can EV be in the future.

Innovating to solar energy powered renewable source electric vehicles is the only solution to this crisis.

George..

R for statistical computations and a good R tutorial ..

The logo of the R-project ..

R is a programming language and free software environment for statistical computing and graphics supported by the R Foundation for Statistical Computing. The R language is widely used among statisticians and data miners for developing statistical software and data analysis.- Wikipedia

Released in August 1993 by Ross Ithaca and Robert Gentleman, R is a Free and Open Source software and is one of the most widely used Statistical Analysis software used by Data Scientists and Analysts from around the world.

Recently I have started being serious about R. Earlier I used to work on Octave and Matlab. Additionally knowing something about R would be an added advantage.  Click here for the original website of R, the R-project. 

I was browsing the net for a good R tutorial. I found one here.. (click here..) Good one ..

Learning R - Richard Cotton, O'Reilly Publishers, US. 499 pages..

R is basically text based. R Studio is Gui based environment. 

RStudio is a free and open-source integrated development environment for R, a programming language for statistical computing and graphics. RStudio was founded by JJ Allaire, creator of the programming language ColdFusion. Hadley Wickham is the Chief Scientist at RStudio.- Wikipedia

 The scientific and statistical community are slowly coming to knew first hand the power of Free and Open Source software..

George
 

Robotic Process Automation ..

What is special about Robotic Process Automation ? Do you actually have robots doing the work ?

Robotic Process Automation is actually the name given to processes that have been automated.

For any activity / process to be eligible to be coalled RPA, it has to satisfy necessarily the following four conditions

1. The process should have a fixed input and output

2. The process should be rule-based, ie. an algorithmic approach

3. The process must be repeatable

4. The process should have a sufficient volume of operation

The Loan Application Processing in banks, credit card application processingare examples of RPA.

According to Techtarget.com, currently, practitioners divide RPA technologies into three broad categories: probots, knowbots and chatbots.

• Probots are bots that follow simple, repeatable rules to process data.
• Knowbots are bots that search the internet to gather and store user-specified information.
• Chatbots are virtual agents who can respond to customer queries in real time.

TECQUIP talk on Technological and Manufacturing Excellence

Recently I was invited for a talk in an Engg College in North Bangalore (SKIT) as part of the World Bank sponsored TECQUIP programme. The title of the talk was Technological Excellence and Manufacturing Excellence, where do we stand ? Thoroughly enjoyed it.

SKIT campus near Nagasandra.

If I were to travel the 60 kms in my own car, causing so much of traffic congestion and environmental pollution, it would have been wasting 2-3 hours of morning prime time. On the advice of my friend Prof. Srishail, I took a bus to the nearest metro rail station in Indira Nagar from Koramangala Sony World stop, just 10 minutes.

By 8 AM, I was in the metro train on purple line that took me to Kempegowda station (Majestic) and then on the green line to the last stop, Nagasandra. The trip lasted just 40 minutes sharp. I saved almost 2 hours and 20 minutes on my journey to Chimney Hills, Chikkabavanara on the Hesaraghatta Road. The journey was so cool and comfortable, it happened so fast that I did not get time to read anything on the way. We should really complement the Namma Metro for getting these two lines ready and soon when more routes will be opened for Metro rail traffic, the city will benefit a lot ..

At SKIT, my presentation for the first two hours to a class  of 50 students was on Technological Excellence (luckily had read up material on NASA, JAXA and ISRO's heroic exploits in deep space) and the rest 3 hrs was on Manufacturing Excellence, thanks to Toyota Production philosophy (Lean Manufacturing and Innovation). It included the basic PDCA cycle and game-based experiential learning sessions on 5S (click here), Standard Operating Procedure (SOP click here), Kaizen (Continuous Improvement, click here) and Theory of Constraints (TOC click here) ..

Deming's PDCA cycle ..

It was a good managerial exposure for the students who are in the final year of engineering in the circuit branches of Electrical, Electronics and Telecommunications, Computer Science and Information Technology. These students are in the process of preparing themselves for higher studies and the job market. I am very hopeful, the students too enjoyed it. The TECQUIP Orientation programme which they are undergoing has been initiated with help from the industry at SKIT.

The portal http://www.msmeonline.in is an interesting online education and industrial consulting group setup by my fiend Raju Gundala from NITIE Mumbai, that has been doing great yoemen service to small and medium scale businesses in Bangalore and around the country. Through efforts of Raju Gundala, the technical academic institutions in and around Bangalore are benefiting a lot by getting the right amount of industrial exposure. Hope he will come out with very innovative programmes that can benefit both industries and academic institutions around Bangalore.

With Bangalore being the third largest Indian city in terms of GDP contribution, industrial activity in Bangalore is picking up and manufacturing excellence is the buzzword everywhere. With the industrial titans of Toyota, Bosch and Headquarters of ISRO, there is not better place than Bangalore to be discussing about technological excellence and manufacturing excellence.

George ..
 

Avoiding an algorithmic way of life

Most of us these days are very much dependent on systems and IT for most of pur activities and actions. For example when we want to search for the meaning of a word we Google it to find what it means. Wehen we want to go to a place in the city the next day, the previous night we google it to find where is the location and what is the easiest way to reach there. When i want to but a digital camera, instead of going to the nearest store I would immediately look at the best ecommerce store, Amazon and find the variety of digicams available, the features, costs etc.

Is our life being dictated by the algorithms of Google, Amazon and the like ?

When we read a book on Kindle, more than what we learn from the book, Kindle and Amazon learns more about the reader, his interests, reading speed and so on. In future we are worried if Kindle is connected to face recognition and motion sensors, it will even tell us what to study, depending on our interests, where to live, place preference and whom to date and whom to marry !!

George..

Chandrayaan 2 launched with clockwork precision ..

Courtesy TOI ..

While the whole world watches, the Scientists and Technologists from ISRO waitedin baited breath for the launch at 2:43 PM (IST) today 22 July 2019 of Chandrayaan 2 aboard the gigantic cryogenic 640 Tonne GSLV Mark III rocket.

Everything went to clockwork precision (click here for the video) and the Chandrayaan was launched on Monday afternoon. It is one of the toughest missions of ISRO, as this is the first mission which has a lander and a rover in it that will walk on the lunar surface.  Th present time duration of walking is two weeks, a lunar day, and it will cover almost 150-200 m of lunar surface. Then the night sets in, the rover does not get the sunlight (lunar night) and energy to power its solar arrays.

After two weeks at the onset of the lunar day, on Oct 5, we have to see how it will be able to capture sun's rays and leap back to life. The Chinese rover Yutu 2, in the lunar South pole sent aboard Chang'e 4 rocket, though initially was projected to have a life of a month is now in its sixth month and very healthy.


After a six and a half weeks flying manoeuvre covering 3,82,000 kms through barren space the 2378 kg spacecraft will enter lunar orbit.

The spacecraft will do a nail-biting soft landing in the Aitkin Basin in the lunar South Pole on the 7th of September, to share lunar surface with YUTU 2, the other healthy rover from China in the lunar South Pole for more than six months.

Courtesy ISRO, BBC

It's just good prayerful wishes from the bottom of the heart of every Indian for ISRO .. ISRO, get ahead with optimism, faith and great self-confidence .. The future belongs to YOU .. 

Just heard that ISRO is planning Chandrayaan 3 in 2020, which will also bring lunar soil back to earth. That is going to be a still tougher mission as the robotic rover will have to get back to the lander, that will then rise and dock with the orbiter in lunar orbit for the return journey to the earth.

This will be the precursor to India's first manned trip to Moon sometime around 2030 or before.

Europe and Japan which have managed to land on asteroids has not yet landed on lunar surface. This is a great moment not only for India, but the whole world ..

George..