Rishi Shah

As darkness would descend on earth, our heavens come alive with twinkling stars, compelling constellations and peculiar planets along with multitude of mysterious marvels that are sprinkled all over the sky. The elusive planet Mercury could be seen shortly before dawn in eastern sky during the beginning of the month. It would be then lost in solar glare, due to its proximity to Sun. It would be marching with the stars shimmering in constellations Gemini (twins), Cancer (crab) and Leo (lion). Planet Venus could be visualized vividly in southeastern sky before sunup.

Venus In Eastern Sky
Venus would be entering the eastern sky late at night. It would be scintillating splendidly among the stars of Taurus (bull) and Gemini. On 13 August, Venus at its greatest western elongation from the Sun would be placed high in the morning sky to be applauded well. Planet Mars could be marvelously appraised from late night in eastern sky until daybreak in southwestern sky. It would be mingling with fairly faint stars that sketch the sprawling V-shaped constellation Pisces (fishes) with coruscating binary star Alrescha (softly expressing the chord in Arabic) that would be perching pleasantly on Pisces’ southern tip.
Alrescha has been surmised to be merely 311 light-years away. The mighty planet Jupiter could be admired from nightfall in southeastern sky till about midnight in the southwestern sky. It would be sailing across the eastern section of teapot-alike constellation Sagittarius (archer). Similarly ringed planet Saturn could be wowed to the east of Jupiter almost during the same time period. It would be also drifting among the stars dwelling on the eastern flank of Sagittarius. The distant dwarf planet Pluto could be located between Jupiter and Saturn, if observed carefully and patiently through telescopes.
The far-away greenish planet Uranus and bluish planet Neptune could be perceived in southeastern sky from very late in the night till before sunrise. They would be gliding slowly through the southern sector of cute constellation Aries (ram) and across the eastern area of constellation Aquarius (water bearer). Constellations Pisces, Eridanus (river) and Cetus (sea monster) with mesmerizing variable red giant star Mira would be unfurling below Uranus. Magnificent Mira would be sheer three hundred light-years away.

Full Moon
The full moon (Janai Purnima) which is popularly dubbed the sturgeon full moon would mystify onlookers on 03 August. Its nickname would highlight the time of the year when large sturgeon fishes would be harvested abundantly in specific lakes. The new tenebrous new moon would fall on 19 August (fathers’ day). Gai Jatra (festival of cow), Krishnami Asthami (Lord Krishna’s birthday), Teej and Rishi Panchami mostly for women would be celebrated cheerfully on 04, 11, 21 and 23 August respectively. The Perseid meteor shower would be displaying up to sixty bright meteors per hour especially during its peak this year that would occur from the night of 11 until day-begin on 12 August 2020.
The shower would be generally running annually from 17 July to 24 August. The progenitor of Persids would be credited to 109P/Comet Swift-Tuttle, which was discovered in 1862 independently by American astronomers Lewis Swift and Horace Tuttle. Even though the second quarter moon would wash away some dim meteors, the resplendent ones would still put up gorgeously good show with shiny shooting stars.
The meteors would be emanating from the radiant point that would be residing relaxed in the constellation Perseus (legendary hero). Comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle would require utterly 133 years revolving once around Sun. It had last reached perihelion (closest approach to Sun) in 1992 and would return again in 2125. When comets would tumble around the Sun, the dust they emit would gradually spread into dramatic dusty trail around their tracks.
Every year when the earth would rush through these particles, these extremely fast minute moving pieces of grit-matter would collide with our atmosphere and disintegrate demonstrating fiery and colorful streaks in the sky. Thus, the space debris interacting with our atmosphere creating the perplexing Perseids would have originated allegedly from comet Swift-Tuttle with nucleus measuring sparsely twenty six kilometers across. This would comparatively be considered to be twice the size of the object that had triggered the demise and extinction of the dinosaurs circa sixty five million years ago.

UAE's Mars Probe
As the first country in the Arab world, United Arab Emirates (UAE) has successfully launched an interplanetary Mars Mission probe which would arrive at Mars in February 2021. It would spend two years orbiting the red planet and provide unprecedented global view of the Martian atmosphere. Working closely with the American University of California and Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory (SSL), UAE has jump-started interplanetary space program in a nation that, until now, had produced earth observation satellites. The probe lifted-off from the site on Tanegashima Island in Japan aboard a Japanese H-IIA rocket.
The puny car-mimicking spacecraft with two solar panels was built and tested at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder, USA in collaboration with Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC) in Dubai.
The challenging mission was named Hope (al amal in Arabic) to send strong message of optimism to millions of young Arabs. The sophisticated instruments developed by Emirati experts in cooperation with SSL would study and scrutinize mystical Martian climate. The Hope orbiter would consist of multi-band camera, the Emirates eXploration Imager (EXI) and an Emirates Mars Infrared Spectrometer (EMIRS).
A Long March-5 rocket blasted off at the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site in south China's Hainan Province, carrying the Mars probe, Tianwen-1. Meaning the questions to heaven the moniker Tianwen was chosen from the title of particularly pronounced poem written by famed poet Qu Yuan living in ancient China. For the first time the Long March-5 carrier rocket, which has been claimed to be currently China's largest launch vehicle, had been put into practical use.
The Long March-5 had also exceeded the second cosmic velocity, as the fastest China's carrier rockets from those that have been deployed to date. The rocket, codenamed Long March-5 Y4 would use environment-friendly propellants like liquid oxygen, liquid hydrogen and kerosene.
Comprising of an orbiter, a Lander and rover Tianwen-1 would weigh nearly five tones. It has been accepted that this craft would be the heaviest deep space probe that China has sent so far. Tianwen-1 would boldly encounter Mars by May 2021.

Perseverance Landing
NASA's latest Mars rover Perseverance lofted elegantly on an astrobiology mission to detect signs of ancient microbial life and to fly unique helicopter-drone on another world for the first time. A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket took off flawlessly from Cape Canaveral, Florida with Mars-bound cargo.
Perseverance would be at Mars on 18 February 2021, becoming the fifth rover to complete the voyage since 1997. By next year, Mars could therefore have three active rovers, including NASA's Curiosity, which has traversed barely twenty three kilometers on Mars since it landed in 2012 in addition to the current Chinese Tianwen-1.
Perseverance with a tougher set of six wheels can autonomously navigate two hundred meters per day. With the dimension of a small SUV, it would weigh a metric ton, has 19 cameras and two microphones, which scientists would be the first to record strangely arcane sounds on Mars. It has a two-meter-long robotic arm and is powered by modernly minute nuclear battery.
Once on the surface, NASA will fly the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter a 1.8 kilogram aircraft that will attempt to zoom in an atmosphere that is only one percent of earth’s density. Perseverance's primary responsibility is to scour the planet for evidence of primitive life forms.
Scientists believe that more than three billion years ago the planet was much warmer than today and covered in rivers and lakes, conditions which could be conducive to concoct simple microbial life.
Perseverance's drill would gather intact rock cores and place them in test tubes, to be collected by a future joint US-European venture to be transported to earth for final analysis. NASA has chosen the queer Jezero crater as its landing site, a giant impact basin just north of the Martian equator.

(Shah is an expert on astronomy)