AstrotalkUK

Not for profit website/blog on astronomy, space and my writing

Episode 92: Revisiting Panspermia with Prof. Wickramasinghe

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Prof. Chandra Wickramasinghe

The idea of Panspermia, that life exists throughout the universe and spreads via asteroids, comets and cosmic dust, has been around for a long time. Two of the strongest advocates were Professor Fred Hoyle and Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe. 

In this episode I spoke at length with Professor Wickramasinghe about his long and distinguished career championing the idea of panspermia the covering the topics:

  • Initial difficulties in establishing Panspermia as a legitimate and respectable topic for scientific study.
  • Professor Wickramasinghe’s journey in 1960 form Cylon (as it was known at the time) to Cambridge as Hoyle’s Phd student.
  • His personal recollections of Fred Hoyle (initially his Phd supervisor and later collaborator) and Arthur C Clarke, who had made Cylon his home in the late 1950s.
  • His views on how the research on Panspermia has developed and where it stands today

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  • Prof. Fred Hoyle 1962
  • Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe 1978
  • Fred Hoyle and Wickramasinghe 1980
  • Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe 2001
  • Home-made telescope late 1950s
Pictures curtesy of Prof. Wickramasinghe

Episode 89 – Carbon Nanotubes

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Gadhadar Reddy

In his 1979 novel, Fountains of Paradise, Arthur C Clarke imagines a cable stretching from the Earth’s equator to Geosynchronous orbit. He called it a “space elevator” and imagined it would be constructed from continuous pseudo-one-dimensional diamond crystals. Bangalore based NoPo Technologies is now commercially producing Carbon Nanotubes. Could this material, one day be used to construct Clarke’s space elevator?

Materials that offer high strength alongside low mass are highly sought after by the aerospace industry. In the past, it was aluminium, titanium and Carbon fibre. The new wave of materials consists of Graphene and Carbon nanotubes. Carbon nanotubes like diamonds, soot and graphene are allotropes of Carbon. Same atomic structure but differ in physical construction.

NoPo Technologies was established in 2011 by the CEO Gadhadar Reddy and is already commercially supply Carbon Nanotubes to Japan and elsewhere.

Some of the themes we discussed include:

  • NoPo Technologies was incorporated in 2011 and is probably the only producer of Carbon Nanotubes in India at the present.
  • Carbon Nanotubes have desirable attributes of high thermal and electrical conductivity, tensile strength, resilience to radiation and are extremely lightweight.
  • Nopo Technologies commercially produce single-walled Carbon Nanotubes of about 8 nm diameter and 2000 nm long.
  • Use cases currently include lightning conductors on aircraft, insulators for cryogenic fuel tanks, black surfaces for star trackers on spacecraft and molecular scale filters that can be used for producing biological membranes or even water filters for desalination plants.

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  • NOPO Offices in Bangalore
  • Electron Microscope
  • Carbon Nanotubes
  • Anto assessing a new batch of Carbon Nanotubes
  • Manufacturing vessel
  • Raman Specrometer

Episode 56: 7th October 2012 – SpaceguardUK

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SpaceguradUK As the dinosaurs on the Earth 64 million years ago discovered, comets and asteroids have the potential for unexpected arrival with devastating consequences.

The spectacular collision of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 with Jupiter in July 1994 dramatically raised awareness and no doubt a little concern amongst the heads of governments across the planet.

Since then, the British government has not really got engaged and so it is left to a handful of skilled and dedicated individuals through Spaceguarduk to provide the UK with its only organisation to address the hazards of Near Earth Objects.

The fireball over Europe in September 2012, demonstrated the risks are with us today.

The Spaceguard Centre was established by Jay Tate in 1997.

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Episode15:Astrobiology. How did life start on Earth?

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Astrobiology is the study of life outside the earth. Paradoxically, it is advanced by understanding how life started here on earth. More about Astrobiology in the UK at the Astrobiology Society’s website.

In the famous Miller Urey experiment to discover the origin of life, the experiment did not result in primitive life but succeeded in creating organic molecules from inorganic constituents. The starting point of the Miller and Urey experiments was the chemical composition of the early Earth’s atmosphere. Could meteorites also have given life a helping hand?

In today’s episode, Dr Terry Kee from the School of Chemistry at the University of Leeds talks about the key processes involving Phosphorus that may have been critical in kick-starting life on earth. The type of Phosphorus required for these processes is not found on the surface of the Earth today but is found in Iron meteorites. In a new collaborative project funded by £500,000 grant University of Leeds will investigate the beginning of life on Earth 3.8 billion years ago.

Sorry about the quality of the audio – the recording was made in Dr Kee’s office which apparently was much noisier than I remember:(

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