Indian astronaut's launch to Space Station postponed due to bad weather
The much-anticipated launch of the Axiom-4 mission, which will send Indian astronaut Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla to the International Space Station (ISS), has been postponed for the third time.The Indian Space & Research Organisation (Isro) on Monday said that the launch has been postponed due to bad weather in the launch area. Meanwhile, SpaceX said high winds in the ascent corridor is why the launch would be no earlier than Wednesday. advertisementThe Ax-4 mission with astronauts from India, US, Poland and Hungary will launch on June 11, 2025, due to unfavourable weather conditions at the Kennedy Space Center on June 10.
The new targeted launch time is set for 5:30 PM IST on June 11.
The mission, a landmark event for India's space ambitions, is a collaborative effort involving Axiom Space, NASA, SpaceX, and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). It marks India's return to human spaceflight more than four decades after Rakesh Sharma's historic 1984 journey.Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla, a decorated Indian Air Force pilot and Isro astronaut, will serve as the mission's pilot, joining mission commander Peggy Whitson (former NASA astronaut) and specialists from Hungary and Poland.advertisementDr. V. Narayanan, Chairman of Isro, confirmed the delay.The Axiom-4 crew will travel aboard a new SpaceX Dragon spacecraft, launched by a Falcon 9 rocket from Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center.The mission was initially scheduled to launch on May 29 and was delayed to June 8. The launch was then pushed to June 10 due to technical issues.
The mission was initially scheduled to launch on May 29. (Photo: Axiom)
The Ax-4 mission, once underway, will see the astronauts spend up to 14 days aboard the ISS, conducting a suite of scientific experiments, many of which are led by Indian researchers. These experiments will focus on advancing understanding in microgravity, life sciences, and material sciences, and will involve collaboration with scientists from over 30 countries.The postponement, while a minor setback, shows the complexities of spaceflight and the importance of weather in launch operations.The global space community, including millions in India, continues to watch with anticipation as the Axiom-4 mission prepares for its new launch window.Must Watch
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The Hindu
28 minutes ago
- The Hindu
How safe AI is in healthcare depends on the humans of healthcare
Researchers at IIT-Madras and the Translational Health Science and Technology Institute in Faridabad are developing an artificially intelligent (AI) model to use ultrasonography pictures to predict the age of a growing foetus. Called Garbhini-GA2, the model was trained on scans from about 3,500 pregnant women who had visited the Gurugram Civil Hospital in Haryana. Each scan labelled different parts of the foetus, its size, and its weight — measures that can be used to predict a foetus's age. After the training, team members tested it with (unlabelled) scans from 1,500 pregnant women who had visited the same hospital and around 1,000 pregnant women who had visited the Christian Medical College Vellore. They found Garbhini-GA2 erred on the age of the foetus by only half a day. This is a significant improvement over the most common method today: using Hadlock's formula. Because the formula is based on data from Caucasian populations, it has been known to miss the age of the foetus in India by up to seven days, according to the IIT-Madras team. The team now plans to test its model in datasets from around India. This is just a glimpse of how AI tools are quietly reshaping Indian healthcare. From foetal ultrasound dating and high-risk-pregnancy guidance to virtual autopsies and clinical chatbots, they are matching expert accuracy while accelerating workflows. Yet their promise comes entwined with the systemic challenges of data and automation bias, privacy, and weak regulation, often exacerbated by the sensitivities of the healthcare sector itself. Helpful, but can get better Almost half of all pregnancies in Indian women are high-risk pregnancies (HRPs), according to a 2023 study in the Journal of Global Health. In an HRPs, there is a high chance of the mother and the newborn taking ill or dying. The conditions that cause these outcomes include severe anaemia, high blood pressure, pre-eclampsia, and hypothyroidism. The risks are higher for women with no formal education, those from rural areas, and those belonging to marginalised social groups. Experts say routine monitoring is the best way to reduce maternal and perinatal mortality in HRPs. In rural areas, this task is often carried out by auxiliary nurse-midwives (ANMs), female health workers who are the first point of contact between a pregnant woman and the medical system. ANMs are trained by medical professionals to recognise HRPs and advise women on their options. Mumbai-based NGO ARMMAN started such a training programme in 2021 in partnership with UNICEF and the Governments of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. It has been training healthcare professionals, including ANMs, in 'end-to-end management of HRPs,' ARMMAN's director of innovation Amrita Mahale said. The NGO trains ANMs to track and manage HRPs through 'classroom training and digital learning,' Mahale said, adding that ANMs are also supported through a WhatsApp helpline 'for doubt-solving and hand-holding as they go through the learning content and apply it to real-life high-risk pregnancy cases.' When in doubt, ANMs are encouraged to reach out to their trainers with queries. However, 'the trainers themselves are overworked and do not always prioritise responding to ANM queries,' Mahale said. So ARMMAN adopted an AI chatbot earlier this year. It recognises both text and voice-based queries from ANMs and responds in the same medium with clinically validated answers. Medical professionals now 'act as humans-in-the-loop who step in when the chatbot cannot answer a question, or if the ANM is not satisfied with the chatbot's response,' Mahale said. Currently being tested with 100 ANMs, the chatbot has received '94% positive feedback' from its users, Mahale said. 'A domain expert has rated 91% of the answers to date as accurate and satisfactory.' But she also flagged a problem: 'The current lot of speech [recognition] models struggle with Indian languages, especially regional variations and accents.' This means the chatbot might fail to understand about 5% percent of the queries that are shared as voice notes rather than as text. The kindest cut Amar Jyoti Patowary heads the Department of Forensic Medicine at the North Eastern Indira Gandhi Regional Institute of Health and Medical Sciences. He is one of India's few 'virtual autopsy' experts. Autopsies don't have a good public reputation. When Dr. Patowary and his team asked the relatives of 179 deceased people who had undergone an autopsy at the department, about 63% expressed fears of the body being mutilated and delays in conducting funeral rites. Similar issues have been reported from rural Haryana, too. In a virtual autopsy, or virtopsy, a body is scanned with CT and MRI machines to generate detailed images of its internal structures. Then, a computer creates a 3D image of the body. Physicians feed this image into convolutional neural networks (CNNs) — deep-learning models adept at extracting features from one set of images and using them to classify images in others. In 2023, researchers from Tohoku University in Japan built a CNN that could distinguish individuals who had died of drowning from those who had died of other causes using chest CT scans. The model was 81% accurate 'for cases in which resuscitation was performed and 92% for cases in which resuscitation was not attempted,' the authors wrote in their paper. In 2024, Swiss scientists developed a CNN that could say whether a person had died of a cerebral haemorrhage based on postmortem CT images. While conventional autopsies take about 2.5 hours to complete, a virtopsy can be finished in about half an hour, Dr. Patowary said. In conventional autopsies, once the body has been dissected, a second dissection may be required if the first one has been inconclusive. This is harder. But virtopsies allow as many dissections as required since the scans can be used to reconstruct the body again and again. What virtopsies might miss, however, are 'small injuries in the soft tissue' and changes in the colour of tissues and organs and how the body and its fluids smell, which might indicate how a person died, Dr. Patowary cautioned. Yet he also expressed confidence that by combining a virtopsy with a 'verbal autopsy' — checking with an accompanying relative or police officer for clinically relevant details — and a visual examination of the body and its cavities, these challenges can be overcome. Access control These cases indicate that the best use of AI might be as a healthcare professional's assistant. In 2019, MediBuddy, a digital healthcare company that provides online doctor consultations and other services, experimented with an AI bot that could chat with a patient, extract clinically relevant details from the conversation, and compile and present them to a doctor along with suggested diagnoses. Nine of the 15 doctors who tested this app said it was helpful while the rest remained 'sceptical', said Krishna Chaitanya Chavati, MediBuddy's head of data science. He flagged data privacy as a key concern. In India, digital personal information, including an individual's health information, is governed by the Information Technology Act 2000 and the Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023. Neither Act specifically mentions AI technologies, although lawyers suggest the latter could apply to AI tools. Even then, the 'DPDP Act lacks clarity on AI-driven decision-making and accountability,' lawyers wrote in a May 2025 review. To allay these concerns, Chavati said strong data security protocols are necessary. At MediBuddy, the team has deployed a few, two of which are a personal identifiable information masking engine and role-based access. A masking engine is a programme that identifies and hides all personal information from specific algorithms, preventing unauthorised users from tracing the data to a single individual. Role-based access ensures no one individual within the company is able to access all of an individual's data, only the parts relevant to their work. In the loop Shivangi Rai, a lawyer who helped draft the National Public Health Bill and the Digital Information Security in Healthcare Bill, said 'automation bias' is also another cause for concern. Rai is currently the deputy coordinator of the Centre for Health Equity, Law & Policy in Pune. Automation bias is 'the tendency to overly trust and follow the suggestions made by an automated system, even if the suggestions are incorrect,' Rai said. This happens when the 'human in the loop', such as a doctor, banks too much on the judgement of an AI-powered app 'rather than their own clinical judgement'. In 2023, researchers from Germany and Netherlands asked radiologists with different degrees of experience to evaluate mammograms (X-ray scan of breasts) and assign them a BI-RADS score. BI-RADS is a standardised metric radiologists use to report the malignancy of cancerous tissue observed in mammograms. The radiologists were told that an AI model would also parse the mammogram and assign a BI-RADS score. In truth the researchers had no such model; they arbitrarily and secretly assigned a score to some mammograms. The researchers found that when the 'AI model' reported an incorrect score, the radiologists' own accuracy fell drastically. Even those with more than a decade of experience reported the correct BI-RADS scores in only 45.5% of such cases. The researchers reported being surprised that 'even highly experienced radiologists were adversely impacted by the AI system's judgments,' the study's lead author said in 2023. For Rai, this study is evidence of a pressing need to train 'doctors on the limits of AI' and to constantly test and reassess 'AI tools being developed for and used in healthcare'. India's rapid adoption of medical AI has illuminated a path to cheaper, faster, more equitable care. But algorithms inherit human fallibility while also further obfuscating it. If technology is to augment and not supplant ethical medicine, medical AI will need robust data governance, clinician training, and enforceable accountability. Sayantan Datta is a faculty member at Krea University and an independent science journalist.
Time of India
an hour ago
- Time of India
After bad weather, liquid oxygen leak stalls Shubhanshu Shukla-piloted Axiom-4 lift-off
CAPE CANAVERAL (FLORIDA): Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla's lift-off to Indian space history will have to wait. As D-Day dawned in India, Elon Musk-owned SpaceX announced that the Axiom-4 launch had been indefinitely deferred, citing a LOX (liquid oxygen) leak in the Falcon-9 rocket that engineers were unable to troubleshoot immediately. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now Axiom-4 was to start its journey to the International Space Station from Kennedy Space Center's Launch Complex-39A at 5.30pm IST on Wednesday. The originally scheduled Tuesday launch was postponed by a day due to adverse weather. "Standing down from tomorrow's Falcon-9 launch of Ax-4 to the International Space Station to allow additional time for SpaceX teams to repair the LOX leak identified during post-static fire booster inspections. Once complete - and pending range availability - we will share a new launch (date)," Space X said in a statement released at 8.45pm Eastern Time Tuesday (6.15am IST, Wednesday). Hours earlier, it had shared a video of Falcon-9 and Dragon at sunrise and said the weather was 85% favourable for lift-off, with teams continuing to monitor highwinds in the ascent corridor. Installing purge to plug leak: SpaceX Hours earlier, it had shared a video of Falcon-9 and Dragon at sunrise and said the weather was 85% favourable for lift-off, with teams continuing to monitor highwinds in the ascent corridor. Isro chairman V Narayanan said, "... Based on the discussion on this topic by the Isro team with the experts of Axiom and SpaceX it has been decided to correct the leak and carry out necessary validation tests before clearing for the launch." TOI had reported on June 10 that SpaceX had unresolved technical snags that were detected during a 10-second pre-static test fire. On Saturday, Dragon and Falcon "went vertical" on the launch pad ahead of a dry rehearsal. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now On Sunday (June 8), SpaceX performed the static fire and began analysing data. "We discovered a few things during the static fire that we had to go take a look at. We found a LOX leak that we previously had seen on this booster during its entry on its last mission and discovered that we had not fully repaired the booster during refurbishment, or we actually didn't find a leak and didn't get it corrected," William Gerstenmaier, SpaceX vice-president of build and flight reliability, said late Monday. Stating that teams were trying to fix the issue, he added, "We should get that completed today, and we will have that back in configuration, and we are installing a purge that will essentially mitigate the leak." SpaceX also identified a thrust vector control issue with engine 5. The affected components have since been replaced. Gerstenmaier stressed the company's continued focus on safety and precision, noting that "space flight is really hard, and we are learning every day".
Deccan Herald
an hour ago
- Deccan Herald
Mysuru's DFRL understands gravity of astronauts' food cravings
Mysuru: The launch of the Axiom-4 mission carrying Indian astronaut Shubhanshu Shukla and three others to the International Space Station (ISS) may have been postponed. .But Mysuru-based Defence Food Research Laboratory (DFRL), under DRDO, has prepared a variety of food items that were to have been carried as part of the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) and the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) have developed an Indian menu for space after years of with scientific instruments and personal mementoes, Shubhanshu would have carried Mysuru-made food to the ISS in the Axiom-4 mission that has now been put off. .SpaceX's Axiom 4 mission postponed again, India's Shubhanshu Shukla's maiden journey to ISS officer Madhukar confirmed to DH that the astronaut was to carry a few Indian foods for the mission, including mango nectar (aam ras), carrot halwa (gajar ka halwa), moong dal halwa and a few rice human spaceflight programme director had disclosed this in a meeting held recently in Bengaluru..'As per the memorandum of understanding (MoU) between Isro and DRDO, we are not allowed to give out more details,' Madhukar said..'We are excited that the food products prepared here will be tasted by astronauts of the ISS mission. It is an effort to make the Indian astronaut's space mission memorable,' he cookies and candies are packed for space trips. NASA's space food systems laboratory produces freeze-dried this time the Indian astronaut will have Indian food on DFRL has developed a range of ready-to-eat and semi-hydrated Indian dishes for the mission, tailored for zero gravity. This includes parathas, vegetable biryani, rice and dal, sambar, rajma, khichdi and food has been designed in such a way that it is lightweight, low-volume and easy-to-consume wholesome food. The astronaut just has to add water to the items and warm it before eating it in tickled Rakesh Sharma's taste buds DFRL was established in Mysuru in 1961 to cater to the needs of the Indian Army, Navy, Air Force, and paramilitary forces. It aims to design light-weight food with a longer shelf life under varied climatic had also prepared and packed food for Rakesh Sharma four decades ago.
