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Keywords: Delhi, Satellite

New Delhi: Satellite US 193 has been blown out of the sky, but the next time, something from space makes news, you won't need NASA or even these telescopes to get the latest on what is in the sky, you could probably make do with your PC.

As director of the capital's only Planetorium, Dr Rathnasree has access to a lot of astronomical gadgets.

Yet, the most friendly of them she says, are websites that has the list of almost every satellite up in space, and real time updates on their orbits.

They are ideal even necessary she says, for people like you and me, who don't do much stargazing.

“Many times, people see something very bright moving slowly across the sky and think it's a UFO. When in reality, it could just be a well documented artificial satellite. You find them all on the web,” says Dr Rathnasree.

Abroad, satellite tracking is a full-fledged hobby, with amateur astronomers often blowing the whistle on spy satellites the government wont talk about.

So was this one worth shooting down?

Some speculate it was a cheap new technology to track among other things - elusive nuclear submarines.

The US wouldn't want that know-how falling in the wrong hands that evokes a question---how safe is our own Indian satellites?

India has almost 48 satellites up in space. Aryabhatta and Bhaskar, the earliest among them have already died a fiery death.

There are other defunct ones up there but at 600 to 36,000 kilometre up in the sky, they will take a long, long time before coming down. Till then, we're safe.