Aluminium - Enriching A Billion Lives

"The Fallen Astronaut"  There lies a tribute, made physically out of aluminium, dedicated to the gallant space explorers who have furthered our imagination and knowledge about the cosmos. We have been visiting the moon quite often these days, powered by superior spacesuits and rovers . But our 'out of the world' journey too had a humble beginning.  Our search into the vast unknown began with a lens pointed at the sky in the 16th century. An Italian polymath named Galileo famously denounced “assumptions” about the cosmos, and triggered a scientific revolution – one which has since mesmerised men and women post Renaissance. Over centuries, the obsession to find answers finally propelled us into the Space Age. On 12 April 1961, Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin, a Soviet pilot and cosmonaut became the first human to journey into outer space when his Vostok spacecraft completed an orbit of the Earth. Eight years hence, on July 21, 1969, we heard a cackle on the ...

Aluminium is called the ‘Metal of the Future’, and rightly so. It forms the basis of futuristic technologies and objects such as rockets and satellites which take human endeavours further. NASA’s LAGEOS satellites launched 41 years ago into space speak volumes about innovation and the passion of our species to go beyond in search of knowledge. LAGEOS - LAser GEOdynamics Satellite or LAser Geometric Environmental Observation Survey, are a series of two scientific research satellites designed to provide an orbiting laser ranging benchmark for geodynamical studies of the Earth.  The cannonball shaped satellites have transformed the area of precision measurement technique called laser ranging to measure the movement of Earth’s tectonic plates, detected irregularities in the rotation of the planet. Scientists have able to track small shifts in the earth’s centre of mass. The LAGEOS mission was created with these goals in m...