Ripples In A Teacup

  I’m not meant to be blogging, since my final Board exams are almost upon me, but when Sunita Willams, who’s been stuck on the International Space Station for over 10 months, performed a spacewalk in order to replace a planar reflector 260 miles above the South Pacific Ocean , I had to. The spacewalk done on January 16 th was Sunita’s first spacewalk in 12 years , and the eighth in her career .   NASA has scheduled a second spacewalk on January 23 , from 8:15 a.m. onwards. During the second mission, Sunita and Nick Hague will remove a radio frequency group antenna assembly from the station's truss, and collect samples of surface material for analysis from the Destiny laboratory and the Quest airlock to see whether microorganisms may exist on the exterior of the orbital complex. They will also prepare a spare elbow joint for the Canadarm2robotic arm in the event it is needed for a replacement. Looks like I was panicking over Sunita unnecessarily. In case you m...

I was planning to take a break from blogging and focus on my final exams which are less than five weeks away, but the wildfires in LA make it impossible for me to do so. I always thought wildfires are a summer-time hazard and we are in the midst of what’s meant to be winter! Some learnings for me: A combination of high temperatures, dryness, and high winds give rise to conditions ripe for fires. We are not meant to have these conditions in the middle of winter, but we do now. And when we do, the smaller spark can set off a large-scale wildfire. In 2024, Southern California had an exceptionally hot summer . In the past, a hot summer is usually followed by fall and early winter rains. This year, the rains went missing and left the landscape parched and ready to burn. Southern California experienced two consecutive years of above-average rainfall prior to this dry spell , leading to an overgrowth of vegetation, which, when dried out, became highly flammable fuel. Wildfires are getti...