ISRO opens its 1st visitors gallery to watch rocket launches at Andhra Pradesh's Sriharikota. It's capacity is;

Indian Space Research Organisation's (ISRO) first mission of 2019, Microsat-R, is to be launched into space on 24th January 2019. The 130-kg Microsat-R is a military imaging satellite. Microsat-R and its payload come assembled from a handful of laboratories of the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) and is meant for military use. The satellite was assembled outside and ISRO only interfaced it with its own systems and the launch vehicle, just as it treats any customer satellite. PSLV-C44 will be launched from the older First Launch Pad at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre, Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh. For its part, ISRO is experimenting on two aspects of the vehicle. One is to reuse a waste stage.

Astronomers Captured the First Image of a Black Hole which was a halo of dust and gas, tracing the outline of a colossal black hole at the center of the galaxy M87 (Messier 87) with the help of The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) observations. Black Hole.Black holes were first predicted by Einstein's theory of relativity and these are the extreme cosmic objects, containing incredible amounts of mass within a tiny region.The galaxy is 55 million light-years away from Earth.

21 light years away on december 22, 2018 in the constellation Cassiopeia, a shimmering "super-Earth", five times the mass of Earth, dubbed as HD219134 b was discovered. Unlike the Earth, however, it most likely does not have a massive core of iron, but is rich in calcium and aluminium alongside magnesium and silicon. It shimmers red to blue like rubies and sapphires, because these gemstones are aluminium oxides which are common on the exoplanet. According to the researchers it is one of three candidates likely to belong to a new exotic class of exoplanets. The other two exoplanets studied were 55 Cancri e and WASP-47 e. The study was published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters.

NASA's first mission to demonstrate a planetary defence technique, The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), will get one opportunity to hit small moonlet in the binary asteroid system Didymos. The asteroid poses no threat to Earth and is an ideal test target. NASA revealed that details about its plan to hit a small moonlet target in a double asteroid system with a spacecraft in 2022. The asteroid, called Didymoon or Didymos B, is a moon asteroid around 150 meters tall orbiting a larger body Didymos A, the most accessible asteroid of its size from the Earth.

Recently, Indian and the US navies conducted joint submarine hunting exercise near Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean in which India's P8I Neptune Aircraft and US P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft along with the USS Spruance have participated. The objective of this exercise is to lay the groundwork for coordinating maritime patrol and reconnaissance.The Indian P-8I anti submarine aircraft which participated in the exercise is from Naval Air Squadron 312 based at Naval Station Rajali in Arakkonam, Tamil Nadu and US P-8A Poseidon aircraft which participated in the exercise is from Patrol Squadron VP-8 'Fighting Tigers', based in Jacksonville, Florida.

Israeli lunar mission Beresheet crashed on the Moon. Beresheet crashed during a landing attempt. It is said that the spacecraft had problems with its main engine during its descent that left it unable to slow down in time before it smashed into the lunar surface. Beresheet was an Israeli mission launched by a partnership between nonprofit SpacelL and government-owned aerospace company Israel Aerospace Industries. It is the World's first privately funded lunar Mission. It was a demonstrator of a small robotic lunar lander. Its aims included promoting careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM); and landing its magnetometer and laser retroreflector on the Moon. Beresheet lander had carried a science instrument provided by NASA, a retroreflector instrument scientists would have used to make precise measurements of the distance between Earth and the moon.

Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), NASA's latest planet-hunting probe, has discovered a new world outside our solar system, orbiting a dwarf star 53 light years away. This is the third new planet confirmed by TESS since its launch in April 2018. The planet has been named as HD 21749b. The planets orbits a bright, nearby dwarf star about 53 light years away, in the constellation Reticulum, and appears to have the longest orbital period of the three planets so far identified by TESS.

Astronomers from the University of Texas at Austin, in partnership with Google have discovered two hidden planets in the data collected by the Kepler space telescope. They have created an algorithm that has explored the data taken by Kepler to find out signals that were missed by traditional planet-hunting methods.K2-293b - It orbits a star 1,300 light-years away in the constellation Aquarius. K2-294b - It orbits a star 1,230 light-years away, also located in Aquarius. They both are hot planets and have short orbital periods. They are slightly larger than Earth. They are discovered from the Kepler's extended mission, called K2.

Karnataka's swimmer Srihari Nataraj has emerged as the most prolific gold medal winner at the Khelo India Youth Games. He has won 7 Gold medals in swimming events. P Likith from Karnataka won five gold medals and a bronze medal in swimming at the Khelo India Youth Games. They both were the most decorated gold medalists of the Games.

A group of researchers, led by astronomers at San Diego State University, by using data from NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, detected the new Neptune-to-Saturn size planet orbiting between two previously known planets Kepler-47b and Kepler-47c. This new planet named as Kepler-47d. The research was recently published in the Astronomical Journal.According to a new study, Kepler-47d is about seven times larger than Earth and also the largest of the three planets in the Kepler-47 circumbinary system. The Kepler-47 system is approximately 3.5 billion-years-old and it is 3,340 light years away in the direction of the constellation Cygnus.