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 ...

“Sometime in late 2017, a tiny vehicle will blast into space from India on a 10-day journey to the moon. As it finally lands on the lunar surface some 238,900 miles later, its fate will rest entirely on four small aluminium parts in its shock absorbers. They need to work in a vacuum, with lubrication that doesn’t freeze or jam no matter what the angle. And if they fail, there’s no one to go up and fix it – meaning that eight years of work and $20m (£13.2m) in prize money will be lost in space.” - Late in the year 2015, The Guardian wrote about “Google Lunar XPrize: India's moonshot at the space race” and about Team Indus, India’s only representation at the prestigious competition. So, what is the Google Lunar XPrize and what is the big deal about it? For starters, it is one of the biggest competitions of robotic space exploration in the world in which any participating team has to: Successfully place a spacecraft on the moon’s surface Travel 500 meters Transmit hig...