• Duttada, an amateur scientist, can’t stay away from the keen eyed Dibya Chakshu ( his telescope) for long.

• Duttada's secret ambition was to discover a new Comet

• One night, Duttada detects a new comet.

• Thereafter it is named after the discoverer as the ‘’Comet Dutta’’.

• Indian Institute of Astrophysics conforms his findings.

• His wife Indrani Debi, wishes he hadn’t found the comet.

• A British scientist writes a paper based on Duttada’s discovery.

• A conference of international experts is convened to yield a clue to the cosmic puzzle.

• Duttada and the British defence Science Advisor have a meeting over the impending calamity.

• The problem was that the Comet Dutta was to collide with the earth.

• The experts calculated that the bulk of destructive nuclear power available on earth would be needed to achieve this mammoth task.

• The project ‘’LIGTH BRIGADE’’ was the name of the space mission to stop Comet Dutta from collision with the earth.

• Duttada returns home to a warm welcome and a ceremony.

• On November 18 Duttada receives a secret message, indicating the success of the mission and then he rushes to the sweet shop.

• On 15 December the Comet Dutta passes the earth at a distance of 80,000 km.

• Duttada believed in scientific logic but there are many people who believe in superstition.

• His wife believed in superstition and concluded the collision was avoided because of the ‘yagna’ perfomed by her grandson.

• An Indian astrophysicist• A proponent of steady state cosmology• He developed with Sir Fred Hoyle the conformal gravity theory,

commonly known as Hoyle–Narlikar theory

• Born: July 19, 1938, Kolhapur• Education: Banaras Hindu University,

University of Cambridge• Awards: Padma Bhushan, Padma

Vibhushan• In 1966 joined Institute of Theoretical

Astronomy in Cambridge University• In 1972 joined as professor of Theoretical

physics at the Tata institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai

• In 1989 took charge as Founder-Director of Inter university centre for astronomy & astrophysics (IUCAA), Pune

• Comets are small icy bodies

• Travel past the Sun

• Give off gas and dust as they pass by

• Comets have a nucleus, coma and tail

• Nucleus (very small, about 10 km across) rock & ices (mostly H2O and CO2 [dry ice], some methane CH4 & ammonia NH3)

• Coma (103 to 105 km in diameter) is gaseous & is a cloud of evaporated ices and ions. As comet approaches Sun ices sublime, change from solid to gas, dust grains loosen and move away

• Tails (105 km to 1 AU long), always points away from the Sun. Solar wind (steady stream of solar particles) pushes gas away; dust continues to orbit Sun.

• Small bodies

• Believed to be left over from the beginning of the solar system billions of years ago

• 100,000 asteroids lie in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter

• Largest asteroids have been given names

• Asteroids show up as streaks on photos

• Since they orbit the Sun, they are observed to move with respect to the stars

• Asteroids are typically cratered and irregularly shaped

• Composition of Asteriods are:

• Carbonaceous—containing carbon

• Rocky—mostly silicates

• Metallic—iron and nickel rich

• Asteroids show up as streaks on photos

• Meteors burn up in the atmosphere; meteorites don’t; impacts can and do happen

• Meteor Crater, Arizona

• 50,000 years old

• Projectile was 50 meter diameter, metallic asteroid

• Crater diameter is 1.2 km, 200 m deep

Irons Stony-Irons

Chondrites Carbonaceous Chondrite

Achondrite

• An iron meteorite 100 feet across and 70,000 tons slammed into the Earth at about 43,000mph in the Arizona desert near Flagstaff 40,000 years ago.

• Barringer Crater is 4,100 feet wide and 571 feet deep.

• Our Galaxy is a collection of

stellar and interstellar matter

– stars, gas, dust, neutron stars, gas, dust, neutron

stars, black holesstars, black holes – held

together by gravity.

• 1610 -Galileo discovered the

Milky Way is comprised of

many stars

• Our solar system is made up of:

• Sun

• Nine planets

• Their moons

• Asteroids

• Comets

• The inner four rocky planets at the center of the solar system are:

• Mercury

• Venus

• Earth

• Mars

• The outer planets composed of gas are :

• Jupiter

• Saturn

• Uranus

• Neptune

• Orbit height: 569 km• Launch date: April 24,

1990• Speed on orbit: 7.5

km/s• Power: 2,800 watts

• The Hubble Space Telescope is a space telescope that was carried into orbit by a Space Shuttle in 1990 and remains in operation