Thumba

Thumba is a suburb of Thiruvananthapuram city, capital of Kerala, India.

Location and geography

Thumba is a vast village bordering Meenumkulam in the east, St. Dominic's Vettucaud in the north, and Kochuthura in the south; towards its west is the Arabian Sea. While the border with Meenumkulam is the Parvathi Puthannaar canal, the border with Kochuthura is the Rajiv Gandhi Nagar road. The entire village is flat at sea-level and the ground near to the coast is made of tan coloured beach sand. This is in stark contrast to the rest of the village where the ground is made of white sand where, till the developments of the late 1990s, large amounts of a medicinal herb with white flowers called Thumba grew in abundance, hence the name. TERLS dedicated to the United Nations on February 2, 1968.

Overview

Thumba became well-known to the out-siders after the establishment of Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station (TERLS), which was the first of that kind in India. TERLS was founded in Thumba in 1962 in the district of Trivandrum on the southern tip of India very close to earth's magnetic equator to launch sounding rockets. Thumba also happened to be one of the farthest points from Pakistan and China.

Manorama News

Manorama News (also known as MM TV) is a Malayalam language news channel owned and operated by Malayala Manorama. The channel, based at Aroor Alleppey, was launched on 17 August 2006, which coincided with the Malayalam New Year. The channel was launched with the assistance of media consulting company Mediaguru Consultants Pvt. Ltd.

The thirty-minute simultaneous newscast of regional news, Nattuvartha, from three regions of Kerala, viz. Malabar region, Kochi Region and Travancore region was done for the first time in the country.

Johny Lukose is the News Director and he also anchors a programme "Nere Chove". Romy Mathew and Pramod Raman are the Coordinating Editors of the channel and heads the input and output functions respectively.

Satellite Details