Limited edition pen brought out in honour of the fiftieth anniversary of Yuri Gagarin

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1 Limited edition pen brought out in honour of the fiftieth anniversary of Yuri Gagarin Launch of Vostok that carried Gagarin The year 2011 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the historic flight into space by Yuri Gagarin the first man to take a peek into the mysteries of outer space. Here s a look at how he made it to the top. N.S. ARUN KUMAR ANNA Akimovna Takhtarov and her granddaughter Rita were alone on the freshly plowed field in the village of Smelovka, then part of the Soviet Union. Nothing special was there for them on that day. It was 12 th April 1960 and they were engaged in their collective farm in the serene air of inland beauty, with only a cow grazing nearby adding to its inlay of peasantry. It was about quarter to 11 in the morning, the Sun rather reluctantly blazing its intaglios on the field. Suddenly they SCIENCE REPORTER, JULY 2011 were alerted by a loud noise from a distance. Looking around they could not understand what had happened. Anna was about to return to her work when Rita pulled her hand in bewilderment, pointing to the sky. A man-like creature with his head and body covered in white apparel was seen coming down, in flying colours of wind-blown parachute. Rita was thinking of her first encounter with an ET but Anna was urging her to leave that place, when the falling creature removed its head-cover and greeted in Russian: Hey, Don t run away! I am one among us! They were startled and before they could react they saw a tractor crossing the field followed by a group of running soldiers. The man from the tractor introduced himself as Major Akhmed Gasiyer and said: Good Morning. This is Yuri Gagarin, our comrade and the first man in space. You are the first to witness him landing from his mission. The nation will be proud of you! That moment of glory was not only for them, but also for the whole world because he was the first visitor from Earth to the other world which he saw with a 8 beating heart! A new word had entered the dictionary of the world cosmonaut! This year in 2011, the world of Space Exploration is celebrating the 50 th anniversary of this still yet unparalleled achievement of mankind. Gagarin s leap above the Earth was a great blow to American nationalism following soon after the Soviet success with Sputnik the first man-made object launched into space. It also helped USSR to create the imagery of the most advanced and progressive nation in the world. Farm Boy From Moscow Gagarin was born on 9 March 1934 in a village called Klushino, 100 miles west of Moscow in the Smolensk region of Russia. His Father Alexei Ivanovich was a farmer working in a collective farm. Anna Timofeyana, his mother was a milkmaid. Gagarin was the third of four children, Velentin and Boris, the brothers and Zoya, the sister. During the Second World War, the German army occupied his village, throwing his family out of their home and

2 Yuri Gagarin the space hero THE LEGACY OF YURI GAGARIN 50 TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE FIRST MAN IN SPACE abducted his brother and sister for slavery in Nazi camps. Gagarin helped his parents to dig a dugout and they lived there until the war was over. But these struggles captured much of his time and so he was very poorly educated. Only after the war he could become a regular school-going boy and with the help of two volunteer teachers he managed to give it a dolphindive. Gagarin dreamt of becoming a fighter pilot even from his childhood when he saw a Russian fighter plane crash land in a farm field near his home. It was with bullet-ridden wings, just returning from the battlefield. The pilots who emerged from the plane made an elegant appearance, quite impressive enough in their uniform laden with medals and other adornments. Moreover, one of his teachers at school was also an ex-air force pilot who became a great inspiration for young Gagarin. The teacher helped him to seek the right qualifications leading to the Pilot Training Academy, opting the four-year study at the technical High School in Saratov. While there, he was offered a chance to join the Flying Club at school, his dream becoming true. He learned to fly a light aircraft, taking his first solo flight in He seemed to have an innate ability to handle an aeroplane and a special skill to make smooth landings. He also learned parachuting there but his instructor Dmitry Pavlovich Martyanov remembers him clinging to the door of the plane, out of fear, during his first jump. Dont dither Yuri! The girls are watching he had to say to make Gagarin finally jump with his eyes closed! Let s salute this Russian Icarus at the 50 th anniversary of his great achievement, opening a new vista to the world of space that was never known before. Model of Vostok that took Yuri into space World Cosmonautics Day April 12, the date of Gagarin s historic flight to space, is celebrated as the World Cosmonautics Day. The recommendation for this was made by Gherman Titov, in a letter sent to CPSU on 26 March Dmitry Martyanov was very fond of Gagarin and he advised Yuri to join the Military Aviation School at Orenburg. There his training was to Fly MiG-15 planes. In 1957, Gagarin graduated with top honours from there. The same day he also got married to Valentina Ivanovna Goryacheva whom he met while in Orenburg. Gagarin s exceptional aviation skills made him a fighter pilot at the Arctic Circle where he was assigned as an experimental aviator amidst the challenging weather conditions. His first posting was in Luostari Airbase in Murmansk Oblast close to the Norwegian border. It was in light of the magnificent Aurora Borealis that he made his first flight. By then, the Soviet Space Programme was once again in media highlights, this time for photographing the yet unseen far side of the Moon. Khrushchev had already stated that USSR s next achievement would be a manned mission to space. Gagarin couldn t wait any longer. He returned to Moscow and submitted a request to be considered for cosmonaut training. The authorities were shocked to read it because rather than a delightful dream of Krushchev, nothing in real sense was envisaged or executed. However, the day that followed Gagarin s application, two representatives of the top-secret military unit known by the codename visited Gagarin s residence for discussing the matter. Later, the unit became the Cosmonauts Training Center established by order of the Air Force Commander-in- 9 SCIENCE REPORTER, JULY 2011

3 Stamps issued in honour of Yuri Gagarin s historic flight Chief in March 1960 with Colonel Yevgenly Anatolyevich Karpov as its chief. There was also an assistant to him who was designated as the Director of the center, Lieutenant General Nikolay Petrovich Kamanin. The Making of a Cosmonaut The cosmonaut selection was officially based on two top-secret decrees issued by the USSR Council of Ministers. The process of selection had begun much before the functioning of the Cosmonaut Training Center. The cosmonaut candidates were brought in groups to the Central Military Scientific Research Aviation Hospital near Moscow to undergo a battery of extensive physical, psychological and medical examinations. Initially there were 3,461 candidates, reduced to just 347 after the first screening. The physical parameters were a height of 5 feet 6-7 inches ( cm) and body weight of kilograms but curiously enough Gagarin did get through with a height of 5 feet 2 inches! Gagarin s professional suitability and volunteering nature might have helped him beyond other particularities, his biographers comment. Criteria of moral and ethical characteristics and psychological particularities were also there, again whittling the number of cosmonaut candidates down to 206 and then to a final list of 20. The oldest among these was 35 and the youngest 25 (Gherman Titov). Gagarin was 26 with two others of the same age. They were flown to the Cosmonaut Training Center in the future Star City which was in the middle of a vast emptiness in the Eurasian steppe called Tiura-Tam. It was named after a small railway station which was hard to reach by any means of transport including camel and donkey, Gagarin s Gazebo Gagarin s Gazebo was the veranda of a secret building officially designated as building zero within the Star City where the first (informal) announcement of Gagarin being the first man in space was made. Building zero was on the banks of River Syr Darya, which remained as the actual location of Baikonur Cosmodrome, though its Gherman Titov (left, the second person to orbit Earth) and Yuri Gagarin (right), 1962 co-ordinates (46 0 N, 63 0 E) were a military secret for long. Until 1970s, the Soviets erected plywood facades of a Potemkin village about 250 miles from here, to create the illusion of Baikonur Cosmodrome. On 10 th April 1961, tables were laid out on the veranda of the building zero and a select group of 25 top officials gathered there, including six future cosmonauts. Gagarin and GhermanTitov were among them. It was Chief Designer Sergey Korolev who spoke very plainly: We have six cosmonauts here and it has been decided that Gagarin will fly first We wish you success, Yury Alekseyerich! And Gagarin s reply-speech also was simple but quite charming: Yes, you have made the right choice! but Gagarin states in his memoirs that upon hearing about his selection, his wife s response was Why You? and Gagarin says he had to talk one full night to make her say, if you are sure of yourself, go, everything will be all right! SCIENCE REPORTER, JULY

4 Cover Story The boy who would one day fly out into space Gagarin dreamt of becoming a fighter pilot from his childhood after seeing a Russian fighter plane crash with no water and lot of sand, as described by an engineer, it was a place of scorching heat and bone-chilling cold with swarms of rats, lizards and scorpions as numerous as KGB informants. In those days there were a dozen launch pads scattered around the cosmodrome but it was not Baikonur as many have erroneously referred to it, the latter now in Kazakhstan. In the real sense, the cosmonauts were treated as lab-rats subjecting each of them to the widest possible number of distractions probing the boundaries of human endurance. The concocted training regime consisted of physiologists, psychologists, physicians of various specializations and engineers. As one cosmonaut remembers, they seemed to be testing the hypothesis that human body and mind could adapt to any situation. One test was to solve difficult mathematical equations while sitting in a room where loudspeakers produced noise at the extreme pitch. Another was the Vibration Stand, which could not only knock your soul out of you, but also the stones from your kidney. The most dreaded device was the Rotor a centrifuge that simulated the effects of extreme gravitational pull. It had the shape of a spherical cage spun wildly along the three axes at unimaginable speed (this element of training was avoided after Gagarin s flight, apparently because it was considered a torture!). A testing time for human psyche was the publichnost odinochestva, a facility that allowed a person in isolation to be viewed in every possible way whereas the captive couldn t see the watchers. The isolation chamber prevented every sound from the outside except for some directions from the watchers that appeared in the form of blinking of coloured bulbs or codes. The cosmonaut in the chamber was not allowed to communicate through sound, but through some buttons upon a console that were assigned for specific purposes. Gagarin was in isolation chamber from July 26 to August 5. Then he entered the Heat Chamber where the inmates were subjected to extremes of temperature which was reflected back again and again from the walls coated with metal plates. Humidity also was increased and this ordeal lasted from 30 minutes to 3 hours or until the cosmonaut said he could not endure it anymore, though such reluctance was not favoured by the trainers. The last part of the training was parachute-jumping which was performed from a height of nearly 4 kilometers, during day and night. The Final Two Eventually, after the entire set of training schedules, it became a tale of two cosmonauts Gagarin and Gherman Titov. They were the final sort from the cream of six selected by the Director Nikolay Kamanin by the end of January Among the six, five including Gagarin were ethnic Russians with one being a Ukrainian. Kamanin was well aware of the fact that the first cosmonaut would achieve instant fame and so he went for an honest Russian Face, and the search ended in Gagarin. He had a smile that never left his face, deep blue eyes and kindness that seemed pouring from his eyes Aleksei Leonov wrote later. Gherman Titov was equally competent, coming from the Stalingrad Military Aviation School, but it is said that it was his name that ruined his chance. Gagarin s name was indisputably Autobiography of Gagarin It is not a well-known fact that Gagarin has an autobiography. Gagarin s recollections about his life were compiled and published as Doroga V Kosmos: zapiski letchikakomonavta sssr edited by N. Denisov and S. Borzenko. It came out in 1961 with Pravda as publishers. An English Edition came out under the name Road to Space: Notes of a Pilot- Cosmonaut in The biographies of Gagarin also are a rare find. One that seems most authentic is The First Manned Space Flight: Russia s Quest for Space written by Vladimir Suvorov who was official cameraman working under the Mosnauchfilm documentary film division of USSR. It was co-authored by Alexander Sebelnikov and published by Nova Science publishers, New York in In 1995, Enslow Publishers brought out another title with Michael D. Cole as the author: Vostok 1: First Human in Space. Bloombury s 1998 title Starman: The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin was controversial revealing some Soviet secrets and propagandas though the authors Jamie Doran and Piers Bizony are not considered to be spacehistorians. A 50 th anniversary edition of this is now on the stands. 11 SCIENCE REPORTER, JULY 2011

5 On April 7, Gagarin and Titov had to sit in the spacecraft readied for flight in full suit as proposed by engineers. Yuri Gagarin Memorial Plaque presented to the USSR on 21 January 1971 Russian whereas Gherman Titov suggested a German lineage. Actually it was a derivative of Saint Germanus though it appeared German in pronunciation. According to legend, when Khrushchev was shown the names of the two final candidates, he asked: What kind of Russian is this with a German name, where did you dig him up? The remaining obstacle for Gagarin to become the first cosmonaut was an argument by the Soviet Rocket Pioneer Sergei Korolov. He wanted the first cosmonaut to be an Engineering graduate, so that he could more technically adapt himself to space travel. However, in the later phase of discussions regarding manned space flight, the vehicle was decided to be fully automated, rendering the cosmonaut to be a passive traveller. Then the parameters of psychological preparedness and experience in flight were considered, which favoured Gagarin at its best. Titov was younger by an year than Gagarin (he was 25 then) and it Gagarin s Hero counted towards the period of experience. Above all, it was not an honour, but a sacrifice where there was only a 50% chance of survival. There were records of many botched space flights throughout 1960 and a launch-pad explosion that killed 126 people. Kamanin s posthumously published diaries revealed that he had been reserving Titov for later flights, less complicated than Gagarin s. The Heroic Flight It is not a surprise that Gagarin knew about the dangers of his mission. In a letter written from the Cosmodrome to his wife, Valya, he asked her to remarry if the launching experiment turned fatal. He had also asked her to raise their little daughters not as princesses but as real people. On April 7, Gagarin and Titov had to sit in the spacecraft readied for flight in full suit as proposed by engineers. Around the same time, the spacecraft was weighed, revealing that the vehicle had reached its During the late 1950s and early 1960s, there was a significant loosening of social and cultural restrictions in the USSR. Historians popularly referring to it as the Khrushchev Thaw which allowed previously censored media of entertainments like television, radio, cinema and books from the other world. It was during this period of transformation that Gagarin grew up and he was interested in many classic literature works recently translated into Russian. His favourite was the American writer Ernest Hemingway who had already created a Hemingway Cult complementing the conceptions of Russian masculinity. Aleksei Leonov, one among the final twenty cosmonaut candidates remembers that when he first met Gagarin, he was lounging on a sofa reading The Old Man and the Sea. Gagarin loved Hemingway because he lived as he wished: hunted, fished, braved open sea, loved numerous women and was loved by them in return. He was romantic but not starry eyed, manly but not crude. top limit of mass allowed. With Gagarin, it weighed 4,725 kilograms. So, proposals were put forward to launch Titov who was slightly lighter than Gagarin, but Korolov didn t like any change in schedule and it went on unchanged. On the evening of April 10, a Flight Assignment was decided for Gagarin. According to Moscow Time, it had a time frame of one hour 37 minutes, starting from 9:07 to 10:44 in the morning hours of April 12. Titov was the back-up for Gagarin in the launching schedule and they were given a final technical briefing on the 11 th. At 5.30 in the morning of April 12, both of them were awakened, given their space food along with their routine medical checkups. Gagarin remained cool with a pulse-rate of 64 beats in a minute. By about 6.30, the dressing up of Titov and Gagarin began. The spacesuit had heat-insulation layers causing body temperatures to rise, so Gagarin was dressed after Titov, to reduce his time inside the suit. Then Gagarin spent a few minutes in the test-seat, when technicians checked ventilation and other systems of the spacesuit. The rocket with the payload vehicle was by then ready at Site 2 which was a SL-3 variant of the SS-6 Sapwood Rocket with a height of meters. It had three stages, the first stage with four breakaway boosters with a total weight of tonnes. The module for Gagarin s travel, named the Vostok 1, was mounted on to the top of the instrument module containing the engine system providing 102,000 kg of thrust. Basically it meant that Gagarin was destined to sit on the top of a tin-can placed on the top of a bomb. SCIENCE REPORTER, JULY

6 After spending a few more minutes with Titov and colleagues Gagarin left for Site 2 where he was taken by an elevator to the top of the Rocket. The launch vessel was a small one-manned spherical module with a diameter of 2.3 meters. Before boarding it, Gagarin saw Sergei Korolov looking haggard after a sleepless night. Gagarin was a favourite of Korolev. Gagarin s trainer Ivanovsky was also there who helped Gagarin up the ladder and into the module. Ivanovsky whispered into his ear that 1:2:5 code should be used in case the vehicle needed manual control, under emergency situations. It was already given to Gagarin in a sealed envelope asking to be opened only in case of danger, but Ivanovsky was not sure whether Gagarin would be doing it in any such kind of situation. When Gagarin sat up in his seat, he was strapped to it and the hatch was closed. However, the hatch didn t close hermetically. It was a one time-one way hatch, so Ivanovsky with the help of a fitter, removed all the 32 screws sealing the hatch and putting them back at a frantic pace, which became a reward-claim for the fitter V.I. Morozov, later on. Despite this intervention, the rocket blasted off nearly as per schedule at 09:06:59.7, Moscow Time. There was a problem with the second stage of the Rocket causing it to burn longer than scheduled, raising the spacecraft to a 327 km apogee orbit, instead of the planned 230 km. Gagarin was however not aware of this and communicated his greetings to the ground station also spending a few seconds with his flight journal. But, due to weightlessness, the journal floated on his back without the pencil (which was attached to it with a string) forcing him to use the voice recorder. However, it was on automatic mode, already working without any useful data recorded, so Gagarin rewound it and tried recording again, apparently erasing some previous data. Home! Sweet Home! More than 500 humans have now travelled into space and have watched our home planet from there, but Gagarin was the first man to see it. As he began orbiting the Earth, he tasted food and gazed at the Earth flying below. There was a good view of the Earth which had a very distinct and pretty blue halo. It had a smooth transition from pale blue, blue, dark blue, violet and Yuri Gagarin with his wife and daughter Gagarin And Valya Gagarin met Valya (Valentina Ivanova Goryacheva) at a dance programme while attending the military flight training at the Orenburg Aviation School. Valya was a nursing student, lovely and shy, the youngest of six children in her family. Together they enjoyed reading Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens and to her great surprise Gagarin even brought the works of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the Russian rocket pioneer. They discussed everything they read, Valya commenting to her mother he has sharpened his teeth on the granite of science. I think, he will be going to school all his life! When there was news of Sputnik s historical flight and Khrushchev s announcement of sending a man to space, Gagarin whispered to her ears that it would be none other than himself. On 27 October 1957 Gagarin married Valya in his new officer s greatcoat because it was on the same day he graduated with top ranking honours from Orenburg. They had two daughters. Elena is the chief keeper of Kremlin museums now and younger daughter Galya teaches economics at Moscow University. absolute black! It was a magnificent picture... Gagarin s official statement after flight read. He also added People of the world, let s safeguard and enhance this beauty, not destroying it! Then it was the time to descend and Gagarin expected the 40 second burn of the braking engine, as per the schedule. But, there was a problem. As the burning of the braking engine was about to begin, a single valve within it failed to close completely, letting some fuel escape into the combustion chamber. Since everything was fully automatic, this prevented the main engine from cutting off and it burned to empty all of its remaining fuel. At the same time, the pressurised oxidizer continued escaping through the steering thrusters, causing the rocket to spin wildly around its axis at about 30 degree per second. This was eventually stopped when the preset-timer cut off the engine. Ten minutes after the scheduled time the module plunged into the atmosphere of earth. At about 7 kilometers from Earth, Gagarin prepared to eject from the module. The main hatch was jettisoned and he ejected with two parachutes, one secured as back up. He landed safely onto a field near the Volga River a farmer s wife and her granddaughter were witness to it. Hero of the World Gagarin s travel to space lasted only for 108 minutes, but that was enough for him to become the national hero of Soviet Union and of the World. In the official Soviet documents, however, there is no mention 13 SCIENCE REPORTER, JULY 2011

7 Yuri Gagarin was an inspiration for the younger generation of his time FRED and Matroksha (also known as Phantom Torso) are mannequins developed by NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) and ESA (European Space Agency) respectively. They are armless, legless, human-shaped torsos wrapped in bandages and sent to the ISS (International Space Station) to mimic the effects of radiation and other outer-space phenomenon on the human body. Matroksha recently completed his four months at the ISS collecting data from the radiation bombarded on its body. The studies conducted on these torsos will greatly affect NASA s plan to set up a manned out-post on the Moon and future man-trip to Mars. One of the critical challenges in sending humans on these extended missions is to protect astronauts from the harmful radiation present in outer space. We know that our atmosphere filters out the harmful radiation emitted from the Sun and other inhabitants of the universe like supernova and giant stars, before it reaches the surface of the Earth. Information regarding the amount of radiation present in outer space and the amount that human body actually absorbs is required to design an appropriate spacesuit for the astronauts. This information becomes more critical for long duration space missions such as a Mars trip. Several computer models have being developed over the years That moment of glory was not only for them, but also for the whole world because he was the first visitor from Earth to the other world which he saw with a beating heart! SCIENCE REPORTER, JULY 2011 of Gagarin jumping with the parachute and the details about Gagarin s landing were not known to the world for a long time, till the iron-curtain fell. When local newspapers tried to make stories of Anna Akimovna and her granddaughter seeing Gagarin s descent, KGB officials went to their office and blocked it. This was because as per the prevailing international rules on aviation then, the pilot should have to remain in 14 the craft, from launch to landing. This rule, if applied to Gagarin s flight, would have disqualified him as being the first traveller in space. Nevertheless, Gagarin s historic launch into space and return was the news-headline all over the world. He was awarded the official title of Hero of the Soviet Union and got double promotion to the rank of a major. After his flight, Gagarin spent almost a year travelling all over the world with his wife Valya, as a living icon of Soviet achievement. He visited Czechoslovakia, Finland, England, Iceland, Brazil, Canada, Hungary, France, Cuba, Afghanistan, India and Sri Lanka.

8 Enjoying the Space Rides by space agencies to simulate the space environment and estimations are performed to calculate the radiation amount but actually collecting the radiation information from a torso present at ISS would be a much more efficient way to get realistic numbers. This information will also validate the existing computer codes and guide in developing new ones to predict the radiation amount and effects. To simulate the effect of radiation on human body, several hundred radiation sensors are embedded in Fred and Matroksha s bodies and they are exposed to the radiation at ISS in similar situations as an astronaut will be on a real space mission. NASA scientists have analyzed the results obtained from these sensors and have found that the computer models are actually quite good and are accurate to within 10% of the measured amount. One of the most dangerous kinds of radiation present in space is GCR (Galactic Cosmic Rays). They enter the solar system from outside (distant supernovas) and travel nearly the speed of light. They are charges particles made up of bare nuclei of both light and heavy metals and can affect/damage human cells. Traditional radiation shielding cannot stop GCR particles. The amount of radiation that actually reaches the vital organs of the astronauts should be estimated to ensure proper shielding. The radiation has to pass During the Second World War, the German army occupied his village, throwing his family out of their home and abducted his brother and sister for slavery in Nazi camps. Gagarin helped his parents to dig a dugout and they lived there until the war was over. the spacecraft walls, the spacesuits, and the human body skin before they can damage the organs. There is also secondary radiation resulting from the collision of charged particles with a barrier that needs to be considered. Another factor affecting the health of the astronauts is the solar flare that can suddenly erupt from a sunspot, regions of high magnetic activity and reduced surface temperature. The solar flares comprise of radiation including all wavelengths across the electromagnetic spectrum from radio to gamma rays. Energetic protons are released that can penetrate through the human body causing biochemical damage. One of the most powerful solar flares was observed in September The flare was visible to the naked eye and produced spectacular auroras down to tropical latitudes until Hawaii (USA). Tests need to be conducted on Matroksha by bombarding it with high-energy protons to simulate the effect of solar flares on astronauts during interplanetary missions. The torsos are made up of special plastic that mimics the density of the human body, sliced horizontally into 35 1-inch-thick layers. Within these layers sensors are embedded to measure the amount of radiation. Fred and Matroksha also contain special sensors at the location of the vital organs such as brain, heart, stomach etc. to simulate the effect of radiation on the vital organs of humans. After returning from the world-tour he became actively involved in training his comrades for flight and was deservedly made the Deputy Chief of Cosmonaut Training. In 1967, he began training for the first Soyuz flight, becoming the back-up pilot for Vladimir Komarov who died in a fatal crash. By then, Soviet officials tried to keep him away from any further flights but Gagarin wanted to reach for the skies once again. That dream remained unfulfilled as Gagarin was killed in a MiGjet crash on 27 March 1968, at the age of 34. It was a very sad event for Soviet Union and for the whole world, though the actual There are certain limitations on the amount of shielding that can be provided to the astronauts. There is a weight constraint on the spacecraft as well as on the thickness of the spacesuits. Therefore, better materials need to be developed to provide required shielding from cosmic radiation on long duration space missions. The effects of high amount of radiation for a short period of time versus low doses for an extended period also need to be studied. Matroksha also has actual human blood cells put in small tubes inside the stomach and some other places near the surface. There are small segments of bone marrow inside the torso. The effects of radiation on the blood cells well inside the surface and near the surface are studied to determine the possibility of having leukemia or other types of cancer due to the exposure. The effect of radiation on the DNA of the cell is studied and if the radiation breaks the DNA sequence in several cells in a short amount of time, there is a fair chance that the cell will become cancerous. The cells cannot repair a large amount of DNA breaks in a short period. These tests can be repeated as desired. Ms Swati Saxena is currently pursuing PhD in Aerospace Engineering from the Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, USA. Address: Swati Saxena c/o Dr. Ashok Saxena, 204, Narain Towers, Sanjay Place, Agra reason behind the accident was never revealed or found out. The grief from his death crossed the battlefield of the Cold War as well. It is well documented by the plaque left on Moon by the Apollo 15 mission in memory of Gagarin. Let s also salute this Russian Icarus on the 50 th anniversary of his great achievement, opening a new vista to the world of space that was never known before. Mr N.S. Arun Kumar is Editorial Assistant, Kerala State Institute for Children s Literature, Sanskrit College Campus, Palayam, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala SCIENCE REPORTER, JULY 2011