You Live in a City, Dont You?

If you were to randomly ask that question to everybody on this earth, the probability of being correct is now over 50%.

As of 2007, over 50% of the world lives in cities. By 2050 this number will be over 70%. In India more than 40 cities have a population of over 1 million.



We associate urbanization with progress. For a country like India, economic and social progress has meant that more and more of us today live in cities.

But this also means that the cities are getting strained for resources. There is a strain on water, energy, transportation to name a few resources.

We need better ways to organize ourselves and distribute the available resources. We need to make the cities a livable environment for larger and larger number of people.

The current mode of development involves consumption of available resources without any means of replenishing them. This has led to rampant destruction of the environment.

How do you think we can allow the cities to grow and flourish without harming the environment?

ISRO Lacks Confidence

The moon has water it has now been confirmed by analyzing data obtained from NASA's Moon Minerology Mapper (M3). In the following paper that appeared in Science, the authors have reported their scientific findings:

Character and Spatial Distribution of OH/H2O on the Surface of the Moon Seen by M3 on Chandrayaan-1
C. M. Pieters¹, J. N. Goswami², R. N. Clark³, M. Annadurai⁴, J. Boardman⁵, B. Buratti⁶, J.-P. Combe ⁷, M. D. Dyar⁸, R. Green⁶, J. W. Head¹, C. Hibbitts⁹, M. Hicks ⁶, P. Isaacson¹, R. Klima¹, G. Kramer⁷, S. Kumar¹⁰, E. Livo³, S. Lundeen⁶, E. Malaret¹¹, T. McCord⁷, J. Mustard¹, J. Nettles¹, N. Petro¹², C. Runyon¹³, M. Staid¹⁴, J. Sunshine¹⁵, L. A. Taylor¹⁶, S. Tompkins¹⁷, P. Varanasi<sup>6

1</sup> Brown University, Providence, RI 02912, USA.
² Physical Research Laboratory, Ahmedabad, India.; Indian Space Research Organization, Bangalore, India.
³ U.S. Geological Survey, Denver, CO 80225, USA.
⁴ Indian Space Research Organization, Bangalore, India.
⁵ Analytical Imaging and Geophysics, Boulder, CO 80303, USA.
⁶ Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA 91109, USA.
⁷ Bear Fight Center, Winthrop, WA 98862,USA.
⁸ Mt. Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA 01075, USA.
⁹ Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, MD 20723–6005, USA.
¹⁰ National Remote Sensing Agency, Hyderabad, India.
¹¹ Applied Coherent Technology Corporation, Herndon, VA 22070, USA.
¹² NASA Goddard, Greenbelt, MD 20771, USA.
¹³ College of Charleston, Charleston, SC 29424, USA.
¹⁴ Planetary Science Institute, Tucson, AZ 85719–2395, USA.
¹⁵ University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA.
¹⁶ University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN 37996–1410, USA.
¹⁷ Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Arlington, VA 22203, USA.

This is a wonderful achievement. Three Indian Scientists, J. N. Goswami, M. Annadurai and S. Kumar, from PRL, ISRO and NRSA are listed as authors in this seminal paper.


But what happened to ISRO's own instruments? M3 was NASA's instrument riding on the Chandrayaan. ISRO claimed that they had found water ten months ago when ISRO's own Moon Impact Probe (MIP) landed on the moon. But why did they wait for NASA to come out with the announcement first? Why didn't they have the confidence to come out with the findings before anyone else? Why couldn't ISRO beat NASA in announcing this seminal finding?

Why is ISRO sitting on the large amounts of data collected by various instruments aboard the Chandrayaan rather than analyzing it and beating others in making path breaking discoveries. In hindsight it is easy to look for information in the data. But why didnt the ISRO scientists draw the right conclusions at the right time from the data that they had. The fact remains that ISRO didnt have the confidence to beat NASA in this announcement.

But this is only the beginning, I hope ISRO will look closely into all the data they have collected over the past many months and come out with path breaking discoveries on their own rather than wait for others to lead the way.

Read: The Chandrayaan-I and Water on the Moon Series