General Awareness

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY - October 2016

Oct 2016

Dec 04, 2020

India's Space Department Joins Hands with Indian Startup

India's Department of Space (DoS), under which the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and related organisations work, entered into a first-of-its-kind Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) with an Indian startup to build a private satellite launch vehicle.
This agreement comes months after DoS established IN-SPACe, an authorisation and regulatory body for enabling private players to undertake space activities in India. Under the NDA, the company will be enabled for accessing the facilities and technical expertise available in ISRO centers to proceed with its launch vehicle development program.

Dec 03, 2020

SpaceX Plans Uncrewed Mars Flight Launch in 2 Years

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said that the company is working towards launch of an uncrewed Mars flight in about two years.
Starship is SpaceX's ambitious spacecraft to take humans to the Red Planet. The company has been working on prototypes to find the right design that will work for the transport.
Musk revealed SpaceX's Mars mission plans during an award presentation ceremony in Berlin.
He pointed out that Earth and Mars synchronisation of orbits around the Sun happens approximately every 26 months and the next synchronisation is due in two years.

Dec 02, 2020

China's Chang'e-5 Moon Mission Probe Touches Down

China has successfully put another probe on the Moon.
Its robotic Chang'e-5 mission touched down with the aim of collecting samples of rock and dust to bring back to Earth.
The venture has targeted Mons Rümker, a high volcanic complex in a nearside region known as Oceanus Procellarum.
The lander is expected to spend the next couple of days examining its surroundings and gathering up surface materials.
The intention is to package about 2 kg of "soil", or regolith, to send up to an orbiting vehicle that can then transport the samples to Earth.
It is 44 years since this was last achieved. That was the Soviet Luna 24 mission, which picked up just under 200 g.

Dec 01, 2020

DRDO Creates New Lab for Focused Research along China, Pakistan Borders

In the middle of a border conflict, the government has merged two Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) laboratories to create a new one to do focused research on terrain and avalanches along the borders with China and Pakistan.
The newly created laboratory has been named Defence Geo Informatics Research Establishment by merging two exiting labs.
The two new labs merged by the government are the Manali-headquartered Snow and Avalanche Studies Establishment (SASE) and the other is the Delhi-based Defence Terrain Research Establishment (DTRL).
The SASE had been very actively engaged in the study of snow and avalanches in the operational areas and has prepared an avalanche atlas of almost 3,000 on-road locations in different parts of the country where the armed forces are deployed.
Similarly, the DTRL had been working on different terrains where the armed forces are deployed.

HAL Delivers Biggest ever Cryogenic Propellant Tank to ISRO

Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) has delivered the biggest cryogenic propellant tank (C32 LH2) ever fabricated by the company to Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). It added that this was much ahead of the contractual schedule at a program held in Bengaluru recently.
The C32-LH2 tank is a developmental cryogenic propellant tank of aluminium alloy designed for improving the payload capability of GSLV MK-III launching vehicle.
The four-meter diametric tank is of eight-meter length to load 5,755 kg propellant in the 89 cubic meter volume.
HAL has mastered the skills and technologies required for fabricating welded propellant tank of Aluminium ally to such stringent quality requirement.

Nov 29, 2020

Researchers Creates Hydrogen-Producing Living Droplets

Scientists have built tiny droplet-based microbial factories that produce hydrogen, instead of oxygen, when exposed to daylight in air.
Normally, algal cells fix carbon dioxide and produce oxygen by photosynthesis. The study used sugary droplets packed with living algal cells to generate hydrogen, rather than oxygen, by photosynthesis.
Hydrogen is potentially a climate-neutral fuel, offering many possible uses as a future energy source. A major drawback is that making hydrogen involves using a lot of energy, so green alternatives are being sought and this discovery could provide an important step forward.
The team trapped around 10,000 algal cells in each droplet, which were then crammed together by osmotic compression. By burying the cells deep inside the droplets, oxygen levels fell to a level that switched on special enzymes called hydrogenases that hijacked the normal photosynthetic pathway to produce hydrogen. In this way, around a quarter of a million microbial factories, typically only one-tenth of a millimetre in size, could be prepared in one millilitre of water.

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