Indian space engineering researcher Siddharth Pandey talks about the significance of Ladakh in understanding all things terrestrial and beyond
NASA Spaceward Bound India Program's 2016 team. Pics/Rakesh Rao
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Space engineering researcher Siddharth Pandey, 29, says, to understand if life exists on other planets, one has to first know how it does so on Earth itself. It is the search for this knowledge that sparked the NASA Spaceward Bound Program 12 years ago. Today, many international offshoots of the programme are continuing this endeavour across the globe, with the most recent one being in India. Pandey will be talking about all this and more at his session titled, Astrobiology in the Himalayas this Sunday.
Spaceward Bound team at work
"There are several regions in India that can be useful for scientists to understand how life exists in harsh conditions, and Ladakh is one of those places. So, in March 2015, we made a 10-day plan with a team of 30 from India, Australia and the US, and headed out with the aim to find out regions that would be conducive to our research. This is called path-finding," he tells us.
NASA's astrobiological programme postulated a universal approach that involves three questions - how did life begin and evolve? Is there life beyond Earth and can it be detected? What is the future of life on Earth and in the Universe? The main objective of the NASA Spaceward Bound India Program's expedition to Ladakh was to answer some or at least some parts of these primary questions. In that, Pandey says the trip was fairly successful, "We made some interesting observations and it was a good first expedition. Good enough for us to realise that we need to go back again with more pointed questions and smaller teams that will be staying for longer durations."
Siddharth Pandey
"'Is there life elsewhere?' The work that we do directly feeds into that question, which triggers the imagination of many. You would be surprised to see how life exists in conditions as extreme as they are in Ladakh. One would expect it to not but it does. Water boils at a temperature of 82 to 85 Degree Celcius compared to its normal boiling point at 100 degrees because at that height the atmospheric pressure is really low, so it goes from liquid to gas at a very low energy level. At 5,000 m above sea level oxygen levels are quite low. We were basically breathing in half the amount of oxygen.
Again, you may look around and find no seas but you can find marine sediments that can be traced back to when India broke off from the supercontinent. In fact, if you're lucky, you could even spot small seashells. It has so much information about other planets like Mars and even Venus. The main essence of our work is that it is helping answer a question that is bigger than the problems we face in our day-to-day lives or even at a national level," he says, adding that, "People go, click photos and come back without understanding that Ladakh is not just a pretty place, but so much more."
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