Ø Pakistan named Rizwan Akhtar as the new head for its main intelligence
agency ISI, considered the second most powerful military official after the
Army Chief.
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| Rizwan Akhtar |
Ø The test-firing of the propulsion system on
India’s spacecraft to Mars for four seconds (September 22, 2014) turned out to
be an unalloyed success. What buoyed up the Indian Space Research
Organisation’s (ISRO) engineers was
that the propulsion system, called 440 Newton engine or the Liquid Apogee Motor
(LAM), ignited after it had remained idle for the last 300 days during the
voyage of India’s orbiter to Mars. The LAM was last fired on December 1, 2013
when the spacecraft was slung-shot from its earth-orbit into sun-centric orbit
and its odyssey through space to Mars began. The engine coming to life
at has boosted the confidence of the ISRO engineers about its performance on
the D-day of September 24. It is a forerunner to the most crucial event to take
place on that day when LAM and eight small thrusters on the spacecraft will
come alive simultaneously at 7.17 a.m. They will sizzle for about 24 minutes to
slip India’s orbiter into a Martian orbit with an apoapsis of 80,000 km and a
periapsis of 423 km around the Red Planet. The complex manoeuvre is called Mars
Orbit Insertion.
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