Root Privileges

Month: June 2024

  • A new source of cosmic rays?

    The International Space Station carries a suite of instruments conducting scientific experiments and measurements in low-Earth orbit. One of them is the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), which studies antimatter particles in cosmic rays to understand how the universe has evolved since its birth.

    Cosmic rays are particles or particle clumps flying through the universe at nearly the speed of light. Since the mid-20th century, scientists have found cosmic-ray particles are emitted during supernovae and in the centres of galaxies that host large black holes. Scientists installed the AMS in May 2011, and by April 2021, it had tracked more than 230 billion cosmic-ray particles.

    When scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) recently analysed these data — the results of which were published on June 25 — they found something odd. Roughly one in 10,000 of the cosmic ray particles were neutron-proton pairs, a.k.a. deuterons. The universe has a small number of these particles because they were only created in a 10-minute-long period a short time after the universe was born, around 0.002% of all atoms.

    Yet cosmic rays streaming past the AMS seemed to have around 5x greater concentration of deuterons. The implication is that something in the universe — some event or some process — is producing high-energy deuterons, according to the MIT team’s paper.

    Before coming to this conclusion, the researchers considered and eliminated some alternative explanations. Chief among them is the way scientists know how deuterons become cosmic rays. When primary cosmic rays produced by some process in outer space smash into matter, they produce a shower of energetic particles called secondary cosmic rays. Thus far, scientists have considered deuterons to be secondary cosmic rays, produced when helium-4 ions smash into atoms in the interstellar medium (the space between stars).

    This event also produces helium-3 ions. So if the deuteron flux in cosmic rays is high, and if we believe more helium-4 ions are smashing into the interstellar medium than expected, the AMS should have detected more helium-3 cosmic rays than expected as well. It didn’t.

    To make sure, the researchers also checked the AMS’s instruments and the shared properties of the cosmic-ray particles. Two in particular are time and rigidity. Time deals with how the flux of deuterons changes with respect to the flux of other cosmic ray particles, especially protons and helium-4 ions. Rigidity measures the likelihood a cosmic-ray particle will reach Earth and not be deflected away by the Sun. (Equally rigid particles behave the same way in a magnetic field.) When denoted in volts, rigidity indicates the extent of deflection the particle will experience.

    The researchers analysed deuterons with rigidity from 1.9 billion to 21 billion V and found that “over the entire rigidity range the deuteron flux exhibits nearly identical time variations with the proton, 3-He, and 4-He fluxes.” At rigidity greater than 4.5 billion V, the fluxes of deuterons and helium-4 ions varied together whereas those of helium-3 and helium-4 didn’t. At rigidity beyond 13 billion V, “the rigidity dependence of the D and p fluxes [was] nearly identical”.

    Similarly, they found the change in the deuteron flux was greater than the change in the helium-3 flux, both relative to the helium-4 flux. The statistical significance of this conclusion far exceeded the threshold particle physicists use to check whether an anomaly in the data is really real rather than the result of some fluke error. Finally, “independent analyses were performed on the same data sample by four independent study groups,” the paper added. “The results of these analyses are consistent with this Letter.”

    The MIT team ultimately couldn’t find a credible alternative explanation, leaving their conclusion: deuterons could be primary cosmic rays, and we don’t (yet) know the process that could be producing them.

  • Suni Williams and Barry Wilmore are not in danger

    NASA said earlier this week it will postpone the return of Boeing’s crew capsule Starliner back to ground from the International Space Station (ISS), thus leaving astronauts Barry Wilmore and Sunita Williams onboard the orbiting platform for (at least) two weeks more.

    The glitch is part of Starliner’s first crewed flight test, and clearly it’s not going well. But to make matters worse there seems to be little clarity about the extent to which it’s not going well. There are at least two broad causes. The first is NASA and Boeing themselves. As I set out in The Hindu, Starliner is already severely delayed and has suffered terrible cost overruns since NASA awarded Boeing the contract to build it in 2014. SpaceX has as a result been left to pick up the tab, but while it hasn’t minded the fact remains that Elon Musk’s company currently monopolises yet another corner of the American launch services market.

    Against this backdrop, neither NASA nor Boeing — but NASA especially — have been clear about the reason for Starliner’s extended stay at the ISS. I’m told fluid leaks of the sort Starliner has been experiencing are neither uncommon nor dire, that crewed orbital test flights can present such challenges, and that it’s a matter of time before the astronauts return. However, NASA’s press briefings have featured a different explanation: that Starlier’s stay is being extended on purpose — to test the long-term endurance of its various components and subsystems in orbit ahead of operational flights — echoing something NASA discussed when SpaceX was test-flying its Dragon crew capsule (hat-tip to Jatan Mehta). According to Des Moines Register, the postponement is to “deconflict” with space walks NASA had planned for the astronauts and to give them and their peers already onboard the ISS to further inspect Starliner’s propulsion module.

    This sort of suspiciously ex post facto reasoning has also raised concerns NASA knows something about Starliner but doesn’t plan on revealing what until after the capsule has returned — with the added possibility that it’s shielding Boeing to prevent the US government from cancelling the Starliner contract altogether.

    The second broad reason is even more embarrassing: media narratives. On June 24, Economic Times reported NASA had “let down” and “disappointed” Wilmore and Williams when it postponed Starliner’s return. Newsweek said the astronauts were “stranded” on the ISS together with a NASA statement further down the article saying they weren’t stranded. The Spectator Index tweeted Newsweek’s report without linking to it but with the prefix “BREAKING”. There are many other smaller news outlets and YouTube channels with worse headlines and claims feeding a general sense of disaster.

    However, I’m willing to bet a large sum of money Wilmore and Williams are neither “disappointed” nor feeling “let down” by Starliner’s woes. In fact NASA and Boeing picked these astronauts over greenhorns because they’re veterans of human spaceflight who are aware of and versed with handling uncertainties in humankind’s currently most daunting frontier. Recall also the Progress cargo capsule failure in April 2015, which prompted Russia to postpone a resupply mission scheduled for the next month until it could identify and resolve some problems with the launch vehicle. Roscosmos finally flew the mission in July that year. The delay left astronauts onboard the ISS with dwindling supplies as well as short of a crew of three.

    The term “strand” may also have a specific meaning: after the Columbia Space Shuttle disaster in 2003, NASA instituted a protocol in which astronauts onboard faulty crew capsules in space could disembark at the ISS, where they’d be “stranded”, and wait for a separate return mission. By all means, then, if Boeing is ultimately unable to salvage Starliner, the ISS could undock it and NASA could commission SpaceX to fly a rescue mission.

    I can’t speak for Wilmore and Williams but I remain deeply sceptical that they’re particularly bummed. Yet Business Today drummed up this gem: “’Nightmare’: Sunita Williams can get lost in space if thrusters of NASA’s Boeing Starliner fail to fire post-ISS undocking”. Let’s be clear: the ISS is in low-Earth orbit. Getting “lost in space” from this particular location is impossible. Starliner won’t undock unless everyone is certain its thrusters will fire, but even if they don’t, atmospheric drag will deorbit the capsule soon after (which is also what happened to the Progress capsule in 2015). And even if it is Business Today’s (wet) “nightmare”, it isn’t Williams’s.

    There’s little doubt the world is in the throes of a second space race. The first happened as part of the Cold War and its narratives were the narratives of the contest between the US and the USSR, rife with the imperatives of grandstanding. What are the narratives of the second race? Whatever they are, they matter as much as rogue nations contemplating weapons of mass destruction in Earth orbit matters because narratives are also capable of destruction. They shape the public imagination and consciousness of space missions, the attitudes towards the collaborations that run them, and ultimately what the publics believe they ought to expect from national space programmes and the political and economic value their missions can confer.

    Importantly, narratives can cut both ways. For example, for companies like Boeing the public narrative is linked to their reputation, which is linked to the stock market. When BBC says NASA having to use a SpaceX Dragon capsule to return Wilmore and Williams back to Earth “would be hugely embarrassing for Boeing”, the report stands to make millions of dollars disappear from many bank accounts. Of course this isn’t sufficient reason for BBC to withhold its reportage: its claim isn’t sensational and the truth will always be a credible defence against (alleged) defamation. Instead, we should be asking if Boeing and NASA are responding to such pressures if and when they withhold information. It has happened before.

    Similarly, opportunist media narratives designed to ‘grab eyeballs’ without considering how they will pollute public debate only vitiate narratives, raise unmerited suspicions of conspiracies and catastrophe, and sow distrust in sober, non-sensational articles whose authors are the ones labouring to present a more faithful picture.

    Featured image: Astronauts Sunita Williams and Barry Wilmore onboard the International Space Station in April 2007 and October 2014, respectively. Credit: NASA.

  • A gentle push over the cliff

    From ‘Rotavirus vaccine: tortured data analyses raise false safety alarm’, The Hindu, June 22, 2024:

    Slamming the recently published paper by Dr. Jacob Puliyel from the International Institute of Health Management Research, New Delhi, on rotavirus vaccine safety, microbiologist Dr. Gagandeep Kang says: “If you do 20 different analyses, one of them will appear significant. This is truly cherry picking data, cherry picking analysis, changing the data around, adjusting the data, not using the whole data in order to find something [that shows the vaccine is not safe].” Dr. Kang was the principal investigator of the rotavirus vaccine trials and the corresponding author of the 2020 paper in The New England Journal of Medicine, the data of which was used by Dr. Puliyel for his reanalysis.

    This is an important rebuttal. I haven’t seen Puliyel’s study but Bharat Biotech’s conduct during and since the COVID-19 pandemic, especially that of its executive chairman Krishna Ella, plus its attitude towards public scrutiny of its Covaxin vaccine has rendered any criticism of the company or its products very believable, even if such criticism is unwarranted, misguided, or just nonsense.

    Puliyel’s study itself is a case in point: a quick search on Twitter reveals many strongly worded tweets, speaking to the availability of a mass of people that wants something to be true, and at the first appearance of even feeble evidence will seize on it. Of course The Hindu article found the evidence to not be feeble so much as contrived. Bharat Biotech isn’t “hiding” anything; Puliyel et al. aren’t “whistleblowers”.

    The article doesn’t mention the name of the journal that published Puliyel’s paper: International Journal of Risk and Safety in Medicine. It could have because journals that don’t keep against bad science out of the medical literature don’t just pollute the literature. By virtue of being journals, and in this case claiming to be peer-reviewed as well, they allow the claims they publish to be amplified by unsuspecting users on social media platforms.

    We saw something similar earlier this year in the political sphere when members of the Indian National Congress party and its allies as well as members of civil society cast doubt on electronic voting machines with little evidence, thus only undermining trust in the electoral process.

    To be sure, we’ve cried ourselves hoarse about the importance of every reader being sceptical about what appears in scientific journals (even peer-reviewed) as much as news articles, but because it’s a behavioural and cultural change it’s going to take time. Journals need to do their bit, too, yet they won’t because who needs scruples when you can have profits?

    The analytical methods Puliyel and his coauthor Brian Hooker reportedly employed in their new study is reminiscent of the work of Brian Wansink, who resigned from Cornell University five years ago this month after it concluded he’d committed scientific misconduct. In 2018, BuzzFeed published a deep-dive by Stephanie M. Lee on how the Wansink scandal was born. It gave the (well-referenced) impression that the scandal was a combination of a student’s relationship with a mentor renowned in her field of work and the mentor’s pursuit of headlines over science done properly. It’s hard to imagine Puliyel and Hooker were facing any kind of coercion, which leaves the headlines.

    This isn’t hard to believe considering it’s the second study to have been published recently that took a shot at Bharat Biotech based on shoddy research. It sucks that it’s become so easy to push people over the cliff, and into the ravenous maw of a conspiracy theory, but it sucks more that some people will push others even when they know better.

  • The universe’s shape and its oldest light

    The 3-torus is a strange and wonderful shape. We can’t readily visualise it because it has a complicated structure, but there’s a way. Imagine you’re standing inside a cube in which light is moving from the left face towards the right face. If the two faces are opaque, the right face will absorb the light, say, and that will be that. But say the two faces are not opaque. Instead, if the light passes through the right face and reemerges from the left face — as if it entered a portal and emerged on the other side — you’ll be standing inside a 3-torus.

    If you look in front of you or behind you, you’ll see a series of cubes: they’re all the same cube (the one in which you’re standing) illuminated by the light, which is simply flowing in a closed loop through a single cube. In the early 1980s, physicists proposed that our universe could have the shape of a 3-torus at the largest scale. “There’s a hint in the data that if you traveled far and fast in the direction of the constellation Virgo, you’d return to Earth from the opposite direction,” a 2003 The New York Times article quoted cosmologist Max Tegmark as saying. The idea is funky but it’s possible. Scientists believe our universe’s geometry was determined by quantum processes that happened just after the Big Bang, but they’re not yet sure what that geometry really is. For now, the data are not inconsistent with a 3-torus, according to a paper a team of scientists calling themselves the COMPACT collaboration published in April 2024.

    Scientists try to determine the shape of the universe just the way you would have standing inside the 3-torus: using light, and what it’s revealing ahead and behind you. Light passing through a 3-torus would be in a closed loop, which means the visual information it encodes should be repeated: that is, you would’ve seen the same cube repeated ad infinitum, sort of (but not exactly) like when you stand between two mirrors and see endless repetition of the space you’re in on either side. Scientists check for similar patterns that are repeated through the universe. They haven’t found such patterns so far — but there’s a catch. The distance light has travelled matters.

    Say the cube you’re standing in is 1 km wide. The light will cross this distance in one-trillionth of a second. If it is 777 billion km wide, the light will take a month. And it will take a full year if the cube is 9.5 trillion km wide. We’re talking about whether the universe could be a 3-torus, and the universe was created 13.8 billion years ago. In this time, light can travel a distance of more than 100 sextillion km. If the width of the cube is less than this distance, we might have seen repeating patterns if the universe is shaped like a 3-torus. But if the cube is even wider, the light wouldn’t have finished crossing it even once since the universe was born, therefore no repeating patterns — yet the possibility of the universe being 3-torus-shaped remains. We just need to wait for the light to finish crossing it once.

    Since we can learn so much about the universe’s geometry by studying light, and light that’s travelled the longest would be most useful, scientists are very interested in light ‘left over’ from the Big Bang. Yes, this light is still hanging around, and it’s measurably different from all the other light. Scientists call it the cosmic microwave background (CMB), a.k.a. ‘relic radiation’. It’s left over from a cosmic event that happened just 370,000 years after the Big Bang. We need to subtract the distance light could have travelled in this time from the 100 sextillion km figure (I’m tired of looking at zeroes; you can give it a shot if you like) to find the maximum distance the CMB could have travelled.

    In its April paper, the COMPACT collaboration considered data about the universe that astrophysicists have collected using ground and space telescopes over the years — including about the CMB — and with that have checked whether the possibility still exists that our universe could be shaped like three types of a 3-torus. The first type is the one I’ve considered in this post, and they’ve concluded (as expected) that if the cube is less wide than the distance light could’ve travelled since the universe was born, our universe can’t be shaped like this particular 3-torus. The reason is that the data astrophysicists have put together doesn’t contain signs of repeating patterns.

    (Update, 8.20 pm, June 23, 2024: Here’s a good primer of what these patterns will actually look like, courtesy Nirmal Raj.)

    However, the COMPACT team adds, our universe could still be shaped like one of the other two types of 3-tori even if their respective cubes are smaller than the max. distance. This is because these two shapes include twists that will produce two subtly different images of the universe once the light has completed one loop. And according to the COMPACT folks, they can’t yet eliminate the presence of these images in the astrophysics data. The collaboration’s members have written in the April 2024 paper that they intend to find new/better ways to ascertain their hypotheses with CMB data.

    Until then, look out for… déjà vu?

  • An Ig Nobel Prize for North and South Korea?

    In 2020, India and Pakistan shared the Ig Nobel Prize for peace “for having their diplomats surreptitiously ring each other’s doorbells in the middle of the night, and then run away before anyone had a chance to answer the door.” The terms of the ongoing spat between North Korea and South Korea aren’t any less amusing and they may be destined for an Ig Nobel Prize of their own, even if animosity between the two countries — much like India and Pakistan — is rooted in issues with more gravitas.

    North Korea has of late been sending balloons loaded with garbage over the border to the south whereas South Korea has stepped up its “psychological warfare” by blasting K-pop music over loudspeakers into the north. But as befits any functional democracy, the latter has run into trouble.

    On June 17, Reuters reported the South Korean government faces “audits and legal battles claiming [the loudspeakers] are too quiet, raising questions over how far into the reclusive North their propaganda messages can blast”. Note: K-pop is propaganda because, per the same report, “These broadcasts play a role in instilling a yearning for the outside world, or in making them realize that the textbooks they have been taught from are incorrect,” according to Kim Sung-min, “who defected from the North in 1999 and runs a Seoul radio station that broadcasts news into North Korea”.

    Apparently the speakers passed two tests in 2016 but failed subsequent audits, prompting the national defence ministry to sue the manufacturers. The court threw the case out because “too many environmental factors can affect the performance”. The ministry and the manufacturer have since made up, going by the fact that the ministry reportedly gave Reuters the same excuse when it was under fire over the speakers: environmental factors.

    Imagine being the manufacturer who has to build a ridiculous set of speakers while being able to do nothing about the physics of sound propagation itself. The government wanted the K-pop to reach Kaesong, 10 km in from the border, whereas checks in 2017 found sound from the speakers could only get as far as 7 km, and in most cases managed 5 km. And to think the whole enterprise hinges on (a) North Korea being annoyed enough by the K-pop to blast music of its own in the opposite direction, at least to muddle the South Korean broadcast, and (b) South Korea’s claim that two soldiers defected from the North after listening to the music. Two.

    Did they risk it all to turn the damned things off, you think?

  • On the Nature feature about the Sarafs, a rare disease, and time

    Heidi Ledford has a tragic and powerful story published yesterday in Nature, about a team of scientists at the CSIR-Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology racing to develop a CRISPR treatment for Uditi Saraf, a young girl whose brain was losing neurons due to a very rare, very aggressive genetic condition called FENIB. The story’s power comes from what it reveals about several facets of developing new treatments, looking for a cure for a rare disease, the importance of state support as well as control, the fact of the existence of neglected diseases, the demands made of clinical researchers, self-sufficiency in laboratory research infrastructure, and of course the cost of treatment. Most of all, it is a critical study of time. Uditi passed away four months after one of the researchers working on a CRISPR-based treatment for her told her parents they’d be ready with a solution for her in six. But even before her passing, there was time, there was no time, there was hurry, and there were risks.

    Uditi’s disease was caused by a mutation that converts a single DNA base from a ‘G’ to an ‘A’. A variation on CRISPR genome editing, called base editing, could theoretically correct exactly this kind of mutation (see ‘Precision gene repair’). … But Rajeev and Sonam saw an opportunity for hope: perhaps such a therapy could slow down the progression of Uditi’s disease, buying time for scientists to develop another treatment that could repair the damage that had been done. The Sarafs were on board.

    …

    There were a lot of unknowns in the base-editing project. And in addition to the work on stem cells in the lab, the team would need to do further experiments to determine which base-editing systems would work best, where and how to deliver its components into the body, and whether the process generated any unwanted changes to the DNA sequence. They would need to do experiments in mice to test the safety and efficacy of the treatment. They also needed to get Ghosh’s facility approved by India’s regulators for producing the base-editing components.

    Then there was the pandemic:

    In December 2019, the Sarafs moved back to India. … Then the COVID-19 pandemic struck, and in January 2021, Uditi was hospitalized with severe COVID-19. She spent 20 days in the hospital and her health was never the same, says Sonam. Communication became increasingly difficult for Uditi and she began to pace the house incessantly, rarely even going to sleep. The Sarafs decided to speed up the base-editing project by funding a second team in India.

    Developing treatments take time. Uditi’s story was a one-off, a singular disease that few researchers on the planet were working on, so developing an experimental alternative based on cutting-edge medical technology was a reasonable option. And yet:

    Meanwhile, Devinsky had petitioned a US foundation to devise a different experimental treatment called antisense therapy for Uditi. … The treatments didn’t work. And the experience taught Rajeev and Sonam how long it could take to get approval to try an experimental therapy in the United States. They decided Uditi’s base-editing therapy should also be manufactured and administered in India.

    Uditi didn’t live long enough to receive treatment that could have slowed FENIB’s progression — hopefully long enough for researchers to come up with a better and more long-lasting solution. Now, after her death, the thinking and effort that motivated the quest to find her a cure is in the future tense.

    It will take years to establish the techniques needed to create rapid, on-demand, bespoke CRISPR therapies. Most people with these conditions don’t have that kind of time. … Rajeev has urged Chakraborty to finish the team’s studies in mice, so that the next person with FENIB will not have to wait as long for a potential treatment. … “We are not really trying as aggressively as we did earlier,” he says.

    When the health of a loved one is rapidly deteriorating, the clock of life resets — from the familiar 24-hour rhythms of daily life to days that start and end to the beats of more morbid milestones: a doctor’s visit, a diagnostic test result, the effects of a drug kicking in, the chance discovery of a new symptom, an unexpected moment of joy, the unbearable agony of helplessness. The passage of time becomes distorted, sometimes slow, sometimes too fast. People do what they can when they can. They will take all their chances. Which means the chances they encounter on their way matters. Technological literacy and personal wealth expand this menu of options. The Sarafs knew about CRISPR, had a vague idea of how it worked, and could afford it, so they pursued it. They came really close; their efforts may even prove decisive in pushing a cure for FENIB past the finish line. For those who don’t know about CRISPR-based therapies and/or don’t have the means to pay for it, the gap between hope and cure is likely to be more vast, and more dispiriting. And one chapter of the Sarafs’ journey briefly threatened to pull them to this path — and relentlessly threatens to waylay many families’ laborious pursuits to save the lives of their loved one:

    The Sarafs studied what they could find online and tried the interventions available to them: Indian ayurvedic treatments, a ketogenic diet, special schools, seeing a slew of physicians and trying out various medicines.

    Ledford’s narrative doesn’t get into who these physicians were, but let’s set them and the special schools aside. Just this morning, I read a report by Rema Nagarajan in The Times of India that a company called Natelco in Bengaluru has been selling human milk even though its license was cancelled two years ago. The FSSAI cancelled Natelco’s license in 2021; a few months later, Natelco obtained a license from the Ministry of AYUSH claiming it was selling “Aryuevdic proprietary medicine”. When the Breastfeeding Promotion Network of India complained to the ministry, the ministry cancelled its license in August 2022. Then, a month later, the Karnataka high court granted an interim stay on this cancellation but said the respondents — AYUSH representatives in Karnataka, in the Karnataka licensing authority or from the ministry — could have it vacated. They didn’t bother. In June 2023, the ministry filed objections but nothing more. It finally moved to vacate the stay only in March this year.

    Natelco’s case is just one example. There are hundreds of companies whose charade the Ministry of AYUSH facilitates by allowing specious claims ranging from “Ayurvedic toothpaste” to calling human breast milk “Ayurvedic medicine”. This is not Ayurveda: very few of us know what Ayurveda is or looks like; even Ayurveda itself doesn’t belong in modern medicine. But together with the FSSAI, the food regulation body notorious for dragging its feet when the time comes to punish errant manufacturers, and a toothless advertisement monitoring regime, the Indian food and beverages market has provided a hospitable work environment for quacks and their businesses. And inevitably, their quackery spills over into the path of an unsuspecting yet desperate father or mother looking for something, anything, that will help their child. When faced with trenchant criticism, many of these business adopt the line that their products are not unsafe. But they are terribly unsafe: they steal time to do nothing with it, taking it away from a therapy or a drug that could have done a lot. Such cynical alternatives shouldn’t be present anywhere on any family’s path, yet the national government itself gives them a license to be.

  • The pitfalls of Somanath calling Aditya L1 a “protector”

    In a WhatsApp group of which I’m a part, there’s a heated discussion going on around an article published by NDTV on June 10, entitled ‘Sun’s Fury May Fry Satellites, But India Has A Watchful Space Protector’. The article was published after the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) published images of the Sun the Aditya L1 spacecraft (including its coronagraph) captured during the May solar storm. The article also features quotes by ISRO chairman S. Somanath — and some of them in particular prompted the discussion. For example, he says:

    “Aditya L1 captured when the Sun got angry this May. If it gets furious in the near future, as scientists suggest, India’s 24x7X365 days’ eye on the Sun is going to provide a forewarning. After all, we have to protect the 50-plus Indian satellites in space that have cost the country an estimated more than ₹ 50,000 crore. Aditya L1 is a celestial protector for our space assets.”

    A space scientist on the group pointed out that any solar event that could fry satellites in Earth orbit would also fry Aditya L1, which is stationed at the first Earth-Sun Lagrange point (1.5 million km from Earth in the direction of the Sun), so it doesn’t make sense to describe this spacecraft as a “protector” of India’s “space assets”. Instead, the scientist said, we’re better off describing Aditya L1 as a science mission, which is what it’d been billed as.

    Another space scientist in the same group contended that the coronagraph onboard Aditya L1, plus its other instruments, still give the spacecraft a not insignificant early-warning ability, using which ISRO could consider protective measures. He also said not all solar storms are likely to fry all satellites around Earth, only the very powerful ones; likewise, not all satellites around Earth are equally engineered to withstand solar radiation that is more intense than usual, to varying extents. With these variables in mind, he added, Aditya L1 — which is protected to a greater degree — could give ISRO folks enough head start to manoeuvre ‘weaker’ satellites out of harm’s way or prevent catastrophic failures. By virtue of being ISRO’s eyes on the Sun, then, he suggested Aditya L1 was a scientific mission that could also perform some, but not all, of the functions expected of a full-blown early warning system.

    (For such a system vis-a-vis solar weather, he said the fourth or the fifth Earth-Sun Lagrange points would have been better stations.)

    I’m putting this down here as a public service message. Characterising a scientific mission — which is driven by scientists’ questions, rather than ISRO’s perception of threats or as part of any overarching strategy of the Indian government — as something else is not harmless because it downplays the fact that we have open questions and that we need to spend time and money answering them. It also creates a false narrative about the mission’s purpose that the people who have spent years designing and building the instruments onboard Aditya L1 don’t deserve, and a false impression of how much room the Indian space programme currently has to launch and operate spacecraft that are dedicated to providing early warnings of bad solar weather.

    To be fair, the NDTV article says in a few places that Aditya L1 is a scientific mission, as does astrophysicist Somak Raychaudhury in the last paragraph. It’s just not clear why Somanath characterised it as a “protector” and as a “space-based insurance policy”. NDTV also erred by putting “protector” in the headline (based on my experiences at The Wire and The Hindu, most readers of online articles read and share nothing more than the headline). That it was the ISRO chairman who said these things is more harmful: as the person heading India’s nodal space research body, he has a protagonist’s role in making room in the public imagination for the importance and wonders of scientific missions.

  • A nationalism of Sunita Williams

    The headlines in Indian mainstream media over the course of June 6, after Boeing (finally) launched its Starliner capsule on its first crewed test flight betray a persistent inability to let go of the little yet also false pride that comes with calling Sunita Williams an “Indian-American” astronaut. This is from the Wikipedia page on Williams:

    Williams is a native of Needham, Massachusetts, was born in Euclid, Ohio, to Indian-American neuroanatomist from Mumbai, Deepak Pandya, and Slovene-American Ursuline Bonnie (Zalokar) Pandya, who reside in Falmouth, Massachusetts. She was the youngest of three children. … Williams’ paternal family is from Jhulasan in the Mehsana district in Gujarat, India, whereas her maternal family is of Slovene descent.

    Williams’s national identity is (US-of-) American. She was born in the US and spent all her formative years there, studying and working within an institutional framework that had little to do with India. Why is she still “Indian-American” or even “Indian-origin”, then? By the simple, even facile, virtue of her father having left the country in search of greener pastures after his MD, the forced India connection reeks of a desperation to cling to her achievements as at least partly our own. India doesn’t have a woman astronaut and facing up to this and other impossibilities and eliminating them is an important way that every country has to grow. But keep thinking she’s partly Indian and you may never have to think about what could be stopping women in India from becoming astronauts in future.

    This said, I know very little about Williams’ upbringing. According to Wikipedia, she’s a practising Hindu and has taken copies of the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads to space with her. But I fail to see why these features would make her national identity “Indian-American”. Like me, I imagine the people at large know little about her cultural identity considering her shared Indian and Slovenian heritage. I’d also be wary of conflating the social and political culture of India in the 1950s, when her father left the country, with that prevalent today. A close friend who grew up in India and now lives in the US told me in a conversation last year that pre-2014 India seems lost to her forever. I think even the recent outcome of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections may not change that: a lot of damage Hindu nationalism has wrought is irreversible, especially — but not restricted to — making it okay to aspire to inflicting violence on minorities and liberals. Thus, by all means, even the contrived “Indian” in “Indian-American” refers to another India, not the one we have today.

    “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”

    — LP Hartley, The Go-Between

    Yet in the eyes of those penning articles and headlines, “Indian-American” she is. They’re using this language to get people interested in these articles, and if they succeed, they’re effectively selling the idea that it’s not possible for Indians to care about the accomplishments of non-Indians, that only Indians’, and by extension India’s, accomplishments matter. It’s a good example of why beating back the Hindu majoritarian nationalism in India has been such an uphill battle, and why the BJP’s smarting win in the 2024 polls was so heartening: the nuclei of nationalistic thinking are everywhere, you need just the right arguments — no matter how kettle-logic-y — to nurture them into crystals of hate and xenophobia. Calling Williams “Indian-American” is to retrench her patriarchal identity as being part of her primary identity — just as referring to her as “Indian origin” is to evoke her genetic identity; to recall her skin colour as being similar to that of many Indians; and perhaps to passively inculcate her value to the US as an opportunity for soft diplomacy with India.

  • The meaning of 294-227

    As of 4.25 pm on June 4, the NDA alliance stood to win 294 seats in the Lok Sabha while the INDIA bloc was set for 225 seats. This is more than a pleasant surprise.

    The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) consumed everything in its path in its aggressive bid to stay in power. If it is being pushed back, it is not a feat that can be the product of nothing.

    After a decade of resistance without outright victories, in a manner of speaking, the pushback is a resounding abnegation of the BJP’s politics, and by doing that it embodies what the resistance has stood for: good-faith governance informed by reason and respect for the spirit and letters of the Constitution.

    Embodiment is a treasure because it gives form to some specific meaning in our common and shared reality, which is important: it needs to breach BJP supporters’ pinched-off reality as well. There needs to be no escaping it.

    Embodied meaning is also a treasure because the meaning is no longer restricted to “just” shouts of protest carried off by the wind, words left unread or protests the national government saw fit to ignore.

    This is 294-227 — or whatever the figures are once the ECI has declared final results in all constituencies.

    It’s a win for democracy, but a lot of my elation is coming from the notion that the outcome of the polls also demonstrate not only that journalists’ work matters — we already knew that — but that we’re not pissing into the wind with it. It’s being read, heard, and watched. People are paying attention.

    Congratulations. Keep going.

  • The cost of forgetting Ballia

    In the day or so before June 1, 14 people died in Bihar of heat stroke. Ten of these people were election personnel deployed to oversee voting and associated activities in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, and of them, five died in Bhojpur alone. On Friday, at least 17 people in Uttar Pradesh, 14 in Bihar, and four in Jharkhand had died of heat-related morbidity. And of the 17 in Uttar Pradesh, 13 deaths were reported from Mirzapur alone. This is a toll rendered all the more terrible by two other issues.

    First, after the first phase of the polls, the Election Commission of India (ECI) recorded lower voter turnout than expected (from previous Lok Sabha polls) and blamed the heat. Srinivasan Ramani, my colleague at The Hindu, subsequently found “little correlation” between the maximum temperature recorded and turnouts in various constituencies, and in fact an anti-correlation in some places. By this time the ECI had said it would institute a raft of measures to incentivise voters to turn up. These were certainly welcome irrespective of there being a relationship between turnout and heat. However, did it put in place similar ‘special’ measures for electoral officials?

    On March 16, the ECI forwarded an advisory that included guidelines by the National Disaster Management Authority to manage heat to the chief electoral officers of all states and Union territories. These guidelines had the following recommendations, among others: “avoid going out in the sun, especially between 12.00 noon and 3.00 pm”; “wear lightweight, light-coloured, loose, and porous cotton clothes. Use protective goggles, umbrella/hat, shoes or chappals while going out in sun”; and “avoid strenuous activities when Balliathe outside temperature is high”.

    A question automatically arises: if poll officers are expected to avoid such activities, the polling process should have been set up such that those incidents requiring such activities wouldn’t arise in the first place. So were they? Because it’s just poka-yoke: if the process itself didn’t change, expecting poll officers to “avoid going out in the sun … between 12 pm and 3 pm” would have been almost laughable.

    The second issue is worse. Heat wave deaths in India are often the product of little to no advance planning, even if the India Meteorological Department (IMD) has forecast excessive heat on certain dates. But to make matters worse, there was a deadly heat wave last year in the same region where many of these deaths have been reported now.

    Recall that in the first half of June 2023, more than 30 people died of heat-related illnesses in Ballia village in Uttar Pradesh. After the chief medical superintendent of the local district hospital told mediapersons the people had indeed died of excessive heat, the state health department — led by deputy chief minister Brajesh Pathak — transferred him away, and his successors later denied heat had had anything to do with the deaths.

    So even if the IMD hadn’t predicted a heat wave in this region for around May 30-31, the local and national governments and the ECI should have made preparations for heat exposure leading at least to morbidity. Did they? To the extent that people wouldn’t have had to be hospitalised or have died if they’d made effective preparations, they didn’t. Actively papering over the effects of extreme weather (and of adverse exposure) has to be the most self-destructive thing we’re capable of in the climate change era.

    Featured image: Representative image of a tree whose leaves appear to have wilted in the heat. Credit: Zoltan Tasi/Unsplash.