September 24 will go down in history as a red letter day. India successfully placed its spacecraft in orbit around Mars, becoming the first country in the world to succeed in such an inter-planetary mission in the maiden attempt itself.

At 7.17 am, the 440 Newton Liquid Apogee Motor sizzled with life as it burnt along with the thrusters to slow down the Mars Orbiter Mission  spacecraft to be capturedby the Red Planet.
"MOM has met Mangal," Prime Minister Narendra Modi said announcing the mission's success, after nerve-wracking final moments at the command centre of Indian Space Research Organisation in Bangalore.

Modi, who witnessed the operation along with the space scientists, said the odds were stacked against "us with only 21 of the 51 missions to Mars being successful," but "we have prevailed."
An elated Prime Minister patted the back of Indian Space Research Organisation Chairman K Radhakrishnan and complimented the Indian space scientists for making space history.
With the success of Mangalyaan, India has become the first country in the world to go to Mars in the very first try. European, American and Russian probes have managed to orbit or land on the planet, but after several attempts.

Mars Orbiter Insertion was carried out automatically by commands loaded onto the spacecraft after its velocity was slowed down from 22.1 km per second to 4.4 km per second to be captured by the Martian orbit. The spacecraft had entered the Martian neighbourhood on Monday. At the time of MOM's orbital insertion, its signals took about 12 minutes and 28 seconds to travel to Earth for reception by NASA's Deep Space Network Stations in Canberra and Goldstone that relayed the data in real time to ISRO's station in Bangalore. The first sign of success in the final moments came when ISRO announced that burn of engines on India's Mars orbiter had been confirmed. "All engines of Mars orbiter are going strong. Burn confirmed," said ISRO signaling that history was in the making.
Igniting the main engine was critical as it had been lying in slumber for about 300 days and was woken up briefly for four seconds on Monday.

It was a make or break tricky manoeuvre as even the slightest error would have pushed the orbiter into deep depths of space. Much of the spacecraft's manoeuvre took place behind Mars, as seen from Earth. This meant that from a point four minutes into the Mars Orbiter Insertion burn until three minutes after the scheduled end of the manoeuvre, teams on Earth had no insight into the spacecraft's progress.

The Rs 450-crore Mangalyaan aims to study Mars' surface and mineral composition, and scan its atmosphere for methane, a chemical strongly tied to life on Earth. The spacecraft was launched on November 5, 2013 on homegrown PSLV rocket from Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh on its nine-month long odyssey. It had escaped the earth gravity pull on December 1, 2013. The 1,350 kg spacecraft is equipped with five instruments including a sensor to track methane or marsh gas -- a possible sign of life, a colour camera and a thermal imaging spectrometer to map the surface and mineral wealth of the Red Planet.

Search giant Google today said it is working with government to launch a nationwide contest for developing a mobile application for the PM's Office, an initiative to support the Digital India programme.

"MyGov, the citizen engagement platform of the Government and Google are collaborating to launch a nationwide contest to develop a mobile app for the PM's Office," Google said in a statement.

Google said the mobile app will bring the PMO to every citizen and the contest will showcase how Indians can build a world class app. As part of supporting the Prime Minister's vision, Google will run a number of initiatives which also include programmes such as helping women get online, getting Indian SMEs online and showcasing India's rich heritage and culture online which will further promote the digital empowerment of citizens.

The search giant said it will continue to build a vibrant language ecosystem online and help the government transition into the increasingly 'mobile' India. To encourage digital literacy and Internet safety, Google is also introducing curriculum for schools, officials and elected representatives. Google is working with the Department of Information Technology and other state governments to develop these initiatives.  Google India Vice President and Managing Director Rajan Anandan said India is already home to the third largest number of Internet users globally with 245 million users as of June 2014 and is on track to become the second largest user market by 2015 and a 500 million-user market by 2016.

"Yet, there are more than a billion people who will need to be brought online for India to realise the vision of a digitally connected, knowledge economy. Prime Minister Modi's Digital India programme will play a transformational role in achieving this," Anandan added.

 
As U.S. military leaders outlined their strategy before Congress to fight Islamic State militants on the battlefield, the National Security Agency chief said on Tuesday he was watching the media-savvy group's cyber capabilities.Asked whether the Sunni Muslim group was planning cyber attacks on U.S. interests, Admiral Mike Rogers said he could not discuss specifics of the organization's technical capabilities.

"We need to assume that there will be a cyber dimension increasingly in almost any scenario that we're dealing with," Rogers said at a cybersecurity conference in Washington. Islamic State, which controls large swaths of Iraq and Syria, has posted carefully choreographed beheading videos online, trumpeted its violent acts on Twitter and used social media to recruit foreign Islamists to the fight.
"Its public messaging and social media is as slick and as effective as any I've ever seen from a terrorist organization," Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson told the Council on Foreign Relations in New York last week.
Cybersecurity expert James Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies said he did not think Islamic State posed any immediate cyber threat to American interests. While there may be no imminent or specific cyber threat from Islamic State, there is a wide-ranging intent to damage the West, a congressional aide said. Different jihadist groups have talked about launching cyber attacks and it may be just a matter of time before they find someone capable of doing it, the aide said on condition of anonymity.



Rogers, speaking generally on how cybersecurity threats are proliferating across all aspects of American life, said: "There is nothing but increased activity out there." As Pentagon officials told Congress on Tuesday they were preparing for a longer-term campaign against Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, Rogers said cyber defense was a long-haul effort.


The U.S. Cyber Command he leads hopes to have 6,200 cyber employees by 2016 to detect and deflect such threats, and Rogers urged greater cooperation on cybersecurity between government, business and industry. "There are a lot of groups out there - individuals, nation-states - who feel that this is an area worth investing in, because it achieves positive outcomes for them if they can penetrate systems," Rogers said at the Billington Cybersecurity Summit.