General Awareness

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY - August 2016

Aug 2016

Feb 14, 2022

NASA's New Space Telescope Sees 1st Starlight

NASA's new space telescope captured its first starlight and even took a selfie of its giant, gold mirror.
All 18 segments of the primary mirror on the James Webb Space Telescope seem to be working properly one and half months into the mission.
The telescope's first target was a bright star 258 light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major.
Over the next few months, the hexagonal mirror segments — each the size of a coffee table — will be aligned and focused as one, allowing science observations to begin by the end of June.

ISRO Successfully Launches Earth Observation Satellite, Two other Co-passengers on PSLV-C52

The Indian Space & Research Organisation (ISRO) successfully launched the Earth Observation Satellite (EOS-04) onboard the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle. The launch carried two other rideshare satellites into orbit.
The launch was conducted from SAR in Sriharikota to deploy EOS-04 in the Sun-Synchronous Orbit nearly 529 kilometers above the planet. The four-stage rocket lifted off with a student satellite INSPIRESat and a spacecraft dubbed INSAT-2DT that is a precursor of a joint India-Bhutan mission in the future.
The Earth Observation Satellite-04 is also called Radar Imaging Satellite (RISAT) that has been designed to provide high-quality images under all weather conditions for applications such as agriculture, forestry, and plantations, flood mapping, soil moisture & hydrology.

NASA Captures Stunning, First of a Kind Images of Venus' Surface

Stunning images snapped by NASA's Parker Solar Probe have given the very first visible light glimpse of Venus' red-hot surface, revealing continents, plains and plateaus on the inhospitable volcanic world.
Peering beneath the thick and toxic Venusian clouds with the Wide-field Imager for Parker Solar Probe (WISPR) instrument, NASA scientists spotted a bevy of geological features lit up in the faint glow of Venus' nightside surface, alongside a luminescent halo of oxygen in the planet's atmosphere.
The groundbreaking images, taken during the Parker Solar Probe's fourth flyby of Venus on the way to the sun, will give scientists valuable insights into the scorching planet's geology and minerals, and they could reveal more about how Venus became so inhospitable while life on Earth flourished.

Feb 13, 2022

Two Protoclusters of Galaxies Spotted in Early Universe

Each of the two newly-discovered protoclusters, MAGAZ3NE J095924+022537 and MAGAZ3NE J100028+023349, hosts an ultramassive galaxy — the progenitor of brightest cluster galaxies seen in modern-day massive galaxy clusters — in its center. Notably, and in marked contrast to previously discovered protoclusters, MAGAZ3NE J0959 contains a high fraction of quiescent galaxies.
Galaxy clusters grow over time under gravity and, in the present-day Universe, can contain hundreds or even thousands of galaxies, as well as hot gas and dark matter.
As time goes by, their galaxies burn through the fuel available and evolve from vigorously star-forming galaxies into red and dead galaxies.

Feb 12, 2022

AI-based Tool to Find Habitable Planets

Astronomers from Indian Institute of Astrophysics developed a new way to identify potentially habitable planets, with a high probability.
Astronomers developed this new way in association with astronomers from BITS Pilani, Goa campus.
They used an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based algorithm for this, where 60 potentially habitable planets were found out of 5,000 known planets.
The new AI-based method is named as "Multi-Stage Memetic Binary Tree Anomaly Identifier (MSMBTAI)". This method is based on a novel multi-stage memetic algorithm (MSMA), which uses generic notion of a meme. Meme is a knowledge or idea that gets transferred from one person to another by imitation. This method was devised on the basis of a belief that Earth is an anomaly, with possibility of existence of more anomalies among thousands of data point. There are 60 potentially habitable planets out of 5000 confirmed and 8000 candidate planets proposed. The assessment was done on the basis of their close similarity to Earth. These planets can be regarded as candidates for anomalous instances in huge pool of non-habitable' exoplanets.

Feb 11, 2022

New Record in Nuclear Fusion Energy

The prospect of harnessing the power of the stars has moved a step closer to reality after scientists set a new record for the amount of energy released in a sustained fusion reaction.
Researchers at the Joint European Torus (JET), a fusion experiment in Oxfordshire, generated 59 megajoules of heat – equivalent to about 14kg of TNT – during a five-second burst of fusion, more than doubling the previous record of 21.7 megajoules set in 1997 by the same facility.
The feat follows more than two decades of tests and refinements at the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy and has been hailed as a "major milestone" on the road to fusion becoming a viable and sustainable low-carbon energy source.

TCS Launches Clever Energy and two Other Sustainability Solutions

IT services major Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) announced the launch of a new suite of offering for sustainability solutions consisting of TCS Clever Energy, Intelligent Power Plant (IP2) and TCS Envirozone on Microsoft's Azure IoT platform to help organisations gain insights into energy usage, and reduce waste and emissions to accelerate towards their net-zero goals.
TCS Clever Energy platform leverages IoT, AI, machine learning and cloud to help organizations understand intricate energy performance factors, enabling them to become more sustainable and empowering leaders to make informed decisions without compromising business needs.

Feb 10, 2022

Geomagnetic Storm Sends 40 SpaceX Satellites Plummeting to Earth

A powerful geomagnetic storm doomed 40 Starlink satellites launched by SpaceX last week.
Elon Musk's company launched a Falcon 9 rocket bearing the 49 satellites from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on (Feb. 3), but a geomagnetic storm that struck a day later sent the satellites plummeting back toward Earth, where they will burn up in the atmosphere.
Geomagnetic storms occur when a surge of solar wind — charged particles from the sun — smashes into Earth's magnetic field and generates charged particles and currents in Earth's upper atmosphere.

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