Star India has finally found the desi answer to Anne Robinson, the tough-as-nails host of the popular game show The Weakest Link, which is to be launched in mid-January on Star Plus. And she is Neena Gupta, who has marked herself as an independent woman both in her personal and professional life.

Neena Gupta is Star India‘s answer to Anne Robinson (R)

Star opted for Gupta after considering the likes of celebrity journalist and writer Shobha De, actress-turned politician Shabana Azmi and Miss Universe turned actress Sushmita Sen.

India‘s numero uno Hindi entertainment channel recently signed a licensing agreement with BBC Worldwide for the format of - The Weakest Link (TWL) - the game show hugely popular in the UK as well as the US. TWL is expected to follow on the heels of earlier successful game shows on Star Plus such as the Aman Verma-anchored Khullja Sim Sim, and further buoy Star‘s position in the ratings charts.

Star had a hard time zooming in on a host. Several well known personalities were tried and tested, including Sushmita Sen. Sen did a pilot but was found too warm to host such a nasty show. Gupta is believed to have done a brilliant job in the pilot and Star plans to commence shooting shortly with her.

The show reportedly has a prize budget of Rs 250 million.

Whether viewers will take to it or not remains to be seen, but Nair is quite clear Star has made the right choice for the anchor.

"Neena‘s been around for a long time, she‘s known as the firebrand woman. She‘s costing us a good deal, but she‘s the ideal choice," says Nair. Nair says even Synergy, the production house that produced KBC for Star, is more than geared up to take on the challenge of TWL.

"The production house has scaled up substantially and is more than equipped to cater to Star India‘s programming requirements. It has emerged as a large production house," he says.

They‘re streaks of lights in the sky which make for a pleasant sight. But meteor showers are known to damage manmade satellites in their orbits. Bearing this in mind, Indian space agency Isro has braced itself for the Leonid meteor showers expected to peak on Sunday, 18 November, during their ongoing passage through Earth‘s orbit.
The government agency has taken steps to ensure its satellites‘ wellbeing when the showers reach their zenith between 2.30 PM and 3.30 PM and again between 10.30 PM and 11.30 PM on the weekend. Isro will temporarily suspend camera operations and the camera steering mechanism for its remote sensing satellites (IRS) which help meteorologists predict weather through satellite images. Solid state recorders will be off for about 10 hours.

It is taking precautions for its communications and broadcast satellites as well. The solar arrays of the Insat series of satellites will be positioned so that they present minimum surface area to the showers. The Gyros on board these birds will be kept continuously on to detect any disturbances due to impact. In case of any disturbances, the satellites will be brought back to their proper orientation using reaction control thrusters on board. ISRO has also kept designers of the various satellite subsystems on alert to help in taking contingency measures in case of any incident.

IRS satellites are in the near earth polar orbits. According to the Isro, the probability of meteors hitting the IRS satellites is about 0.013 per cent and for INSATs, it is around 0.035 per cent. ISRO currently has five satellites in operation (IRS-1C, IRS-1D, IRS-P3, IRS-P4 and TES) in the Polar sun-synchronous orbits and five satellites (INSAT-2C, INSAT-2DT, INSAT-2E, INSAT-3B and GSAT-1) in the geo-stationary orbit.

The last time Leonids produced what astronomers call a storm was in 1966 when only a handful of satellites orbited Earth. This time round, hundreds of satellites are at risk, providing services ranging from pagers and television to weather forecasts. Predictions for the number of meteors per hour during this year‘s peak on 18 November range from 1,400 to 15,000, with Asia slated to see around 8000 per hour.

In 1999, the last year that a strong Leonids meteor shower was predicted, satellite operators effectively put many of their spacecraft into hibernation (turning off or minimizing data collecting and sending operations) while still maintaining critical services here on Earth.

NASA Space Flight Center‘s Bill Cooke has told media that the odds of a satellite being damaged during the peak hours of the Leonid meteor shower are between 1 in 10,000 and 1 in 1,000. Cooke has indicated that at least one satellite could be significantly damaged during the entire storm which spans several days. The risk this year is five to 10 times greater than in 1999, Cooke said.