r/ProximaScience

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ISRO got invited to something big. NASA has asked India to join its Moon Base program, and the invitation landed in Bengaluru, not Washington.

It happened the ninth India-US Civil Space Joint Working Group meeting, held August 5 and 6 at ISRO's headquarters. ISRO Chairman V Narayanan and US Ambassador Sergio Gor both opened the session. On the working level it was co-chaired by M Sankaran from ISRO's UR Rao Satellite Centre, alongside Wesley Brooks and Kathleen Karika from the US side.

The invitation builds on the Artemis Accords, the framework India signed onto back in 2023 as the 27th country to join. Seventy countries are part of it now.

Here's why India specifically got the call. In 2023, Chandrayaan-3 landed near the Moon's South Pole, a region no country had reached before. That's the same region NASA wants to permanently settle. India isn't just being invited out of goodwill. India has ground truth data NASA doesn't have anywhere else.

Moon Base itself is a different animal from Artemis. Artemis gets astronauts back to the Moon. Moon Base tries to keep them there for good. NASA's building it in phases. Phase one runs 2026 to 2029. Phase two, 2029 to 2032, brings power systems, cargo transport, and communications infrastructure online. Phase three pushes past 2032 into full expansion.

This didn't come out of nowhere. Last year the two agencies launched NISAR, a radar satellite that was a genuine fifty fifty build, first of its kind between them. And Indian astronaut Shubhanshu Shukla flew to the ISS in 2025 through a NASA training pipeline built specifically for this partnership.

ISRO isn't sitting idle either. It's running its own human spaceflight program, Gaganyaan, with a solo Moon landing targeted for 2040.

Nobody's confirmed what India's actual role in Moon Base looks like yet. Just an open invitation.

Still. An open door to the Moon is a door most countries never get offered.

A standard deck has 52 cards, and the number of different ways you can arrange them is 52 factorial, which works out to roughly 8 followed by 67 zeros.

Scientists estimate Earth itself contains somewhere around 10 to the power of 50 atoms. The number of possible shuffles is still bigger than that, by a wide margin.

That means every time you properly shuffle a deck of cards, you're almost certainly creating an order that has never existed before in the history of the universe, and never will again. Nobody has ever dealt that exact sequence, and nobody ever will, even if every person on Earth shuffled constantly for the rest of time.

Dragline silk, the thread spiders use to build the frame of a web, has a tensile strength that sits close to some grades of structural steel. Gram for gram, though, it pulls ahead by a wide margin.

That's because spider silk is roughly five to six times less dense than steel. Take equal weights of both materials and stretch them until they snap, and the silk holds up to more force before breaking.

Steel still wins on stiffness, which is why bridges are built from steel and not webs. But for something that needs to be strong without being heavy, spider silk is one of the best materials evolution has ever produced, and it's been refining the formula for roughly 380 million years.

Wood frogs spend winter completely frozen. Their heart stops. Their breathing stops. Ice fills the spaces between their organs, and by every normal measure, the frog should be dead. It isn't.

Before the freeze sets in, the frog's liver floods its body with glucose, acting like a natural antifreeze. That sugar keeps ice from forming inside individual cells, where it would cause real damage, and pushes the freezing to the spaces around them instead.

Some wood frogs have stayed frozen like this for over 200 days at a stretch, through temperatures well below zero. When spring finally warms the ground, the heart restarts on its own, breathing returns, and within hours the frog is hopping toward the nearest pond to find a mate.

It spends most of the year technically dead, and nobody fully understands why the restart works every single time.

Sharks showed up in the fossil record roughly 400 million years ago. The first true trees didn't appear until about 350 million years ago.

That means sharks had already been swimming, hunting, and evolving for tens of millions of years before a single tree existed anywhere on the planet. When the first forests finally rose out of the ground, sharks were already old news in the ocean.

They've survived every mass extinction event since, including the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. Trees have had to start over more than once. Sharks never had to.

Something about that ordering breaks the usual assumption that land came first and the ocean followed. Here, the ocean had a head start on almost everything.

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