General Awareness

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY - August 2015

Aug 2015

Feb 23, 2019

India to Have Own DNS

The government will soon roll out a public Domain Name Server, or DNS, for India aimed at providing a faster and more secure browsing experience for Internet users in the country, while ensuring that citizens' data is stored locally.
A DNS is a like a directory for the Internet.
It helps to convert domain names that are easy for people to remember into IP addresses, which are used by computers/machines to communicate.
If the DNS is either slow or fails to work, users will not be able to locate web addresses.
As per the government, the main aim of bringing our own public DNS is to ensure availability, particularly for smaller Interest Service Providers (ISPs) who don't have credible DNS. Bigger ones usually have their own DNS.

Feb 22, 2019

Israel Set to Join Elite Lunar Club

Israel`s first spacecraft built to land on the moon was set for launch from Florida on a mission that, if successful, would make the Jewish state only the fourth nation to achieve a controlled touchdown on the lunar surface.
The unmanned robotic lander dubbed Beresheet - Hebrew for the biblical phrase "in the beginning" - was due for liftoff atop a Falcon 9 rocket launched by California-based entrepreneur Elon Musk`s SpaceX company from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.
If all goes according to plan, Beresheet, about the size of a dishwasher, will arrive on the near-side of the moon in mid-April following a two-month journey through 4 million miles (6.5 million km) of space.
A flight path directly from the Earth to the moon would cover roughly 240,000 miles (386,242 km).

Hayabusa-2 Touches Down on Asteroid

A Japanese spacecraft touched down on an asteroid in an attempt to collect a sample of rock from the surface.
The Hayabusa-2 probe was trying to grab the sample from a pre-chosen site on the asteroid Ryugu.
The spacecraft reached asteroid Ryugu in June 2018 after a three-and-a-half-year journey from Earth.
It is expected to return to Earth with the rocky material it has grabbed in 2020.
Ryugu belongs to a particularly primitive type of space rock known as a C-type. The near-Earth asteroid (NEA) is a relic left over from the early days of our Solar System.

Feb 17, 2019

Gene-edited Animal Plan

A researcher in Edinburgh is leading efforts to develop gene-edited farm animals for poor farmers in Africa.
Prof. Appolinaire Djikeng is developing cows, pigs and chickens that are resistant to diseases and more productive.
Among them are cattle that have been gene edited to be heat-resistant.
Details of the project were given at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Washington DC.
Prof. Djikeng is the director of the Centre for Tropical Livestock Genetics and Health.

Feb 14, 2019

NASA's InSight Mission

The US space agency's (NASA) InSight mission has positioned the second of its surface instruments on Mars.
Known as HP3, the heat-flow probe was picked up off the deck of the lander with a robot arm and placed next to the SEIS seismometer package, which was deployed in December.
Together with an onboard radio experiment, these sensor systems will be used to investigate the interior of the planet, to understand its present-day activity and how the sub-surface rocks are layered.

NASA Bids Adieu to Opportunity

Opportunity, a remarkably durable NASA rover designed to roll along the surface of Mars for three months, has stopped communicating with Earth after 15 years of service, ending a mission that astounded the US space agency.
Engineers lost contact with the solar-powered vehicle on June 10 during a dust storm that encircled Mars. Since then, NASA officials made numerous attempts to reach the six-wheeled rover.
Opportunity landed on Mars in January 2004.

Feb 08, 2019

Japan Sets Date for Asteroid Rock Grab

According to the country's space agency (Jaxa), the Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa 2 will attempt to collect a sample of rock from an asteroid on 22 February.
Hayabusa 2 reached asteroid Ryugu in June 2018 after a three-and-a-half-year journey from Earth.
It will descend on the surface and attempt to grab the sample from a pre-chosen site.
The spacecraft will return to Earth with the samples in 2020 after its exploration of Ryugu is complete.

NASA's First Mini-spacecraft

NASA has lost touch with the first mini-spacecraft that ventured into deep space, according to the US space agency which said that it is unlikely the twin CubeSats will be heard from again.
The MarCO CubeSats were launched in 2018 to test if such low-cost technology can operate in deep space.
The twins, nicknamed EVE and WALL-E after characters from a Pixar film, served as communications relays during the InSight's Mars landing, beaming back data at each stage of its descent to the Martian surface in near-real time, along with InSight's first image.
WALL-E sent back stunning images of Mars as well, while EVE performed some simple radio science.
As per NASA, having travelled well past Mars, the twin CubeSats seem to have reached their limit.

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